Abstract
Future medical microrobots, which are likely to be simple microstructures with no actual computational intelligence on board, can be functionalized to perform targeted therapy in the body. In this paper, we describe how the properties of rotating magnetic dipole fields have the potential to enable in vivo swarm control for the popular class of magnetic microrobots that convert rotation into forward propulsion. The methods we describe can be used with swarms of batch-fabricated homogeneous microrobots, and do not require any localization information beyond what is realistically obtainable from medical images.
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards #1435827 and #1650968.
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Notes
- 1.
We have developed a spherical-permanent-magnet robotic end-effector capable of continuous singularity-free rotation of the spherical magnet about any axis [17].
- 2.
We show in [11] that the fields of cubic and certain cylindrical permanent magnets—which are easy to fabricate (and purchase in variety of sizes), fixture, and manipulate—are accurately approximated by the dipole model not far outside of their minimum bounding sphere.
- 3.
We developed an electromagnetic source called the Omnimagnet, comprising three mutually orthogonal coils with a common soft-magnetic spherical core, all in a cubic package [12]. The Omnimagnet was optimized such that its field is accurately approximated by the dipole model just outside of its minimum bounding sphere.
- 4.
We use the “hat” notation to describe unit-normalized vectors (e.g., \(\hat{\varvec{p}} \equiv \varvec{p}/\Vert \varvec{p}\Vert \)), as well as pointing-direction vectors that are inherently unit length (e.g., \({\hat{\varvec{\omega }}}\)).
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Abbott, J.J., Fu, H.C. (2020). Controlling Homogeneous Microrobot Swarms In Vivo Using Rotating Magnetic Dipole Fields. In: Amato, N., Hager, G., Thomas, S., Torres-Torriti, M. (eds) Robotics Research. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28619-4_1
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