Magnetic Microrobots Fabricated by Photopolymerization and Assembly

Xiyue Liang; Yue Zhao; Dan Liu; Yan Deng; Tatsuo Arai; Masaru Kojima; Xiaoming Liu

doi:10.34133/cbsystems.0060

Magnetic Microrobots Fabricated by Photopolymerization and Assembly

Cyborg Bionic Syst. 2023 Nov 14:4:0060. doi: 10.34133/cbsystems.0060. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Xiyue Liang¹, Yue Zhao¹, Dan Liu¹, Yan Deng¹, Tatsuo Arai^{1

2}, Masaru Kojima³, Xiaoming Liu¹

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Biomimetic Robots and Systems, Ministry of Education, State Key Laboratory of Intelligent Control and Decision of Complex System, Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Intelligent Robots and Systems, and School of Mechatronical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.
² Center for Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering, The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan.
³ Department of Materials Engineering Science, Osaka University, Osaka 560-8531, Japan.

Abstract

Magnetic soft microrobots have great potential to access narrow spaces and conduct multiple tasks in the biomedical field. Until now, drug delivery, microsurgery, disease diagnosis, and dredging the blocked blood vessel have been realized by magnetic soft microrobots in vivo or in vitro. However, as the tasks become more and more complex, more functional units have been embedded in the body of the developed magnetic microrobots. These magnetic soft microrobots with complex designed geometries, mechanisms, and magnetic orientation are now greatly challenging the fabrication of the magnetic microrobots. In this paper, we propose a new method combining photopolymerization and assembly for the fabrication of magnetic soft microrobots. Utilizing the micro-hand assembly system, magnetic modules with different shapes and materials are firstly arrayed with precise position and orientation control. Then, the developed photopolymerization system is employed to fix and link these modules with soft materials. Based on the proposed fabrication method, 3 kinds of soft magnetic microrobots were fabricated, and the fundamental locomotion was presented. We believe that the presented fabrication strategy could help accelerate the clinical application of magnetic microrobots.