Abstract
Recently, wireless controlled microrobots have been studied because of their great development prospects in the biomedical field. Electromagnetic microrobots have the advantages of control agility and good precision, and thus, have received much attention. Most of the control methods for controlling a magnetic microrobot use manual operation. Compared to the manual method, the automatic method will increase the accuracy and stability of locomotion and manipulation of microrobots. In this paper, we propose an electromagnetic manipulation system for automatically controlling the locomotion and manipulation of microrobots. The microrobot can be automatically controlled to track various paths by using visual feedback with an expert control algorithm. A positioning accuracy test determined that the position error ranges from 92 to 293 μm, which is less than the body size (600 μm) of the microrobot. The velocity of the microrobot is nearly proportional to the applied current in the coils, and can reach 5 mm/s. As a micromanipulation tool, the microrobot is used to manipulate microspheres and microgears with the automatic control method. The results verify that the microrobot can drag, place, and drive the microstructures automatically with high precision. The microrobot is expected to be a delicate micromachine that could play its role in microfluidics and blood vessels, where conventional instruments are hard to reach.
Highlights
Because of their small size, high controllability, and mobility, wireless controlled microrobots have promising development prospects in the field of survey and manipulation for a microscale space such as microfluidic systems, blood vessels, and inner tissues [1]
To ensure that microrobots have a locomotion ability, various actuation methods have been developed such as electromagnetic [2,3,4,5,6,7], thermal [8], chemical bubble [9], swimming tail [10,11], bacterial [12,13], and hybrid [14]
The magnetic microrobots are mostly manually controlled through joystick or keyboard
Summary
Because of their small size, high controllability, and mobility, wireless controlled microrobots have promising development prospects in the field of survey and manipulation for a microscale space such as microfluidic systems, blood vessels, and inner tissues [1]. The manual control method is an open-loop teleoperation in which the operator transmits motion information to the microrobots through an input device, without any feedback [15]. With this method, the microrobot can be controlled to move in a microfluidic chip [16], in 3D space [17], as well as in vivo [18]. The automatic method is a path-tracking close-loop control method with visual feedback to transmit the positional information to the close-loop controller; by regulating the electromagnetic force in real time, the error between the microrobot and its target position can be eliminated. With the automatic control method using an expert control algorithm, the microrobot performs a point-by-point path-tracking motion. As a micromanipulation tool, the microrobot is used to drag, place, and rotate the micromachines automatically with high precision
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