A Soft Robot To Navigate The Lumens Of The Body Using Undulatory Locomotion Generated By A Rotating Magnetic Dipole Field

In this paper, we describe a soft-robotic actuation concept to enable a mesoscale medical robot to navigate the natural lumens of the body, such as blood vessels and intestines. The concept comprises a simple soft robot with two embedded permanent magnets with alternating magnetic polarity, and a rotating (nonuniform) dipole magnetic field that is swept over the robot, resulting in a traveling-wave undulatory motion that propels the robot forward and backward. This soft-actuation technology can be fabricated in a wide range of sizes due to its simplicity, and has the potential to be applied in a variety of diagnostic and therapeutic contexts. We conduct experiments and numerical simulations to verify the movement of the soft robot. Then, we confirm the benefits of using nonuniform dipole fields over using uniform fields, as well as the benefits of alternating the polarity of the magnets embedded in the device.