Soft-bodied Miniature Mobile Robots

ongoing

Untethered mobile milli/microrobots would have a radical impact in medicine. Such untethered tiny machines could access smaller regions inside the body, remain inside the body for long durations as semi-implantable medical devices, and enable diagnostic and therapeutic medical operations in hard or currently not possible to reach regions inside the body with minimal or no invasion. While many groups have been working intensely on creating such new machines for potential medical applications, there are still many significant challenges that must be addressed: 3D design, fabrication and materials of safe and multi-functional medical mobile robots down to tens of micrometer size scale, robust locomotion of these robots inside the complex human body, precise navigation control under medical imaging modalities, integrating diagnostic and therapeutic medical functions to them, and demonstrating their clinically relevant medical applications in in vivo animal models. To address these challenges, we propose to create new soft-bodied mobile milli/microrobots with medical functions and sizes down to tens of micron scale to address the above challenges of untethered miniature robots. Such shape-programmable tiny soft machines will be created from biocompatible magnetic soft composite materials, will be actuated by external magnetic fields or gradients, will have multimodal robust locomotion capability, integrated medical functions and safe interactions inside the human body, will be tracked by real-time medical imaging systems, and will be demonstrated in clinically relevant active local cargo (e.g., drug) delivery, remote heating-based coagulation and hyperthermia, and deliberate vessel and tube clogging applications. Research tasks of the robot design, fabrication and materials, robot actuation, locomotion and control, robot medical functions, and robot characterization and in vitro, ex vivo and in vivo testing will be performed to achieve our research objectives.