A novel miniature virus-inspired swimming robot for biomedical applications

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel concept of virus-like swimming robot in the range of nano to micro scales for biomedical applications. Viruses are submicroscopic, intracellular parasites that consist of nucleic acid genome and protein capsid. Their shapes help them to move within the infected host organisms and attach to host cells. In this paper, main geometrical features of the viral structure are utilized for conceptual design of the virus-inspired swimming robot and resultant thorny spherical shaped body is equipped with a new inclined and concentric multi-flagella propulsion system for operation in low Reynolds number fluid flow environment. In off-propulsion situation a theoretical formula is derived for thrust value estimation. On the other hand, to investigate the robot behavior in the fluid media in on-propulsion condition, flow field around the robot is simulated using a numerical strategy consisting of surface methods of regularized Stokeslet and Rotlet theory. For propulsion control of the robot a multilayer artificial neural network is designed and employed then flow field of the robot wake is analyzed using Lagrangian Coherent Structure (LCS) concept. Furthermore, potential characteristics and specific features of this kind of miniature robots are discussed as well as its application. The results indicate the capability of the miniature robot to perform complex missions in low Reynolds number fluid flow environment especially bodily fluid systems including lymphatic, urinary and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) systems.