An On-Wall-Rotating Strategy for Effective Upstream Motion of Untethered Millirobot: Principle, Design, and Demonstration

Liu Yang, Tieshan Zhang, Han Huang, Hao Ren, Wanfeng Shang*, Yajing Shen*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Journal Publications and ReviewsRGC 21 - Publication in refereed journalpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Untethered miniature robots that can access narrow and harsh environments in the body show great potential for future biomedical applications. Despite the many types of millirobot that have been developed, swimming against the fast blood flow remains a big challenge due to lack of the ability to stay still and the large fluidic resistance from blood. This article proposes an on-wall-rotating strategy and a streamlined millirobot to achieve effective upstream motion in the lumen. First, the principle of on-wall-rotating strategy and the dynamic motion model of the millirobot is established. Then, a critical safety angle Θs is theoretically and experimentally analyzed for the safe and stable control of the robot. After that, a series of experiments are conducted to verify the proposed driving strategy. The results suggest that the robot is able to move at a speed of 5 mm/s against flow velocity of 138 mm/s, which is comparable to the blood flow of 2700 mm3/s and several times faster than other reported driving strategies. This work offers a new strategy for the untethered magnetic robot construction and control for blood vessels, which would promote the application of millirobot for biomedical engineering. © 2023 IEEE.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2419-2428
JournalIEEE Transactions on Robotics
Volume39
Issue number3
Online published9 Mar 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jun 2023

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Key-Area Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province under Grant 2020B090925001, in part by the Science Technology and Innovation Committee of Shenzhen under Grant SGDX20201103093003017 and Grant JCYJ20200109114827177, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant NSFC62273323, and in part by Hong Kong RGC General Research Fund under Grant 11216421

Research Keywords

  • Robots
  • Force
  • Immune system
  • Torque
  • Blood
  • Friction
  • Fluids
  • Magnetic control
  • microrobot
  • millirobot
  • on-wall-rotating
  • upstream motion
  • ROBOTS
  • BIOPSY

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