Motion control of magnetic microrobot using uniform magnetic field

A microrobot with untethered control in 3D space is a good choice to be applied in the fields of biomedicine with in small and confined workspace. In this paper, an electromagnetic actuation system (EMA) which combined with Helmholtz coil and Maxwell coil for the microrobot 5 DOF locomotion in 3D space is built. The magnetic field analysis of the proposed 3D EMA system was analyzed by finite-element-method (FEM) with multi-physics COMSOL software. The proposed EMA system can produce magnetic field with different characteristics such as a controllable uniform gradient magnetic field, a rotating magnetic field and a oscillating magnetic field in a three-dimensional space by independently changing the current in each coil. In this paper the 3D motion dynamic equation model of microrobot was established. A novel control method for the gravity compensation for the wireless locomotive microrobot was proposed. The proposed method has the property that the direction of magnetic flux and the locomotion path of the microrobot are independent. Meanwhile, it can achieve the horizontal motions or nearly horizontal motions and overcome the gravity well at the same time. It has been verified by experiments in 3D liquid environment. With the proposed method, the microrobot shows good performance in horizontal motions as well as various motions in the 3D space.