Soft magnetic microrobot doped with porous silica for stability-enhanced multimodal locomotion in nonideal environment

TL;DR

This paper presents a porous silica-doped soft magnetic microrobot that demonstrates enhanced stability and multimodal locomotion in nonideal biological environments, with potential applications in precision medicine.

Contribution

The study introduces a porous silica doping method to improve the stability and mechanical properties of magnetic microrobots for operation in complex, nonideal environments.

Findings

Successful multimodal locomotion in nonideal conditions

Porous silica doping improves adhesion and mechanical stability

In vivo demonstration of stable locomotion under disturbances

Abstract

As an emerging field of robotics, magnetic-field-controlled soft microrobot has broad application prospects for its flexibility, locomotion diversity as well as remote controllability. Magnetic soft microrobots can perform multimodal locomotion under the control of a magnetic field, which may have potential applications in precision medicine. However, previous researches mainly focus on new locomotion in a relatively ideal environment, lacking exploration on the ability of magnetic microrobot locomotion to resist external disturbances and proceed in a nonideal environment. Here, a porous silica-doped soft magnetic microrobot is constructed for enhanced stability of multimodal locomotion in the nonideal biological environment. Porous silica spheres are doped into NdFeB-silicone elastomer base, improving adhesion properties as well as refining the comprehensive mechanical properties of the microrobot. Multimodal locomotions are achieved, and the influence of porous silica doping on the stability of each locomotion in nonideal environment is explored in depth. Motions in nonideal circumstances such as climbing, loading, current rushing, wind blowing, and obstacle hindering are conducted successfully with porous silica doping. Such a stability-enhanced multimodal locomotion system can be used in biocatalysis as well as thrombus removal, and its prospect for precision medicine is highlighted by in vivo demonstration of multimodal locomotion with nonideal disturbance.