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Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field

Inspired by insects in nature, an increasing number of soft robots have been proposed to mimic their locomotion patterns. As a wireless actuation method, the magnetic actuation technique has been widely applied to drive soft magnetic robots for diverse applications. Although recent works on soft mat...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Xu, Ruomeng, Xu, Qingsong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10376972/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37504157
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8030269
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author Xu, Ruomeng
Xu, Qingsong
author_facet Xu, Ruomeng
Xu, Qingsong
author_sort Xu, Ruomeng
collection PubMed
description Inspired by insects in nature, an increasing number of soft robots have been proposed to mimic their locomotion patterns. As a wireless actuation method, the magnetic actuation technique has been widely applied to drive soft magnetic robots for diverse applications. Although recent works on soft materials have stimulated the development of soft robots, it is challenging to achieve the efficient movement of soft robots for in vivo biomedical application. Inspired by centipede locomotion, a soft octopodal robot is designed in this paper. The robot is fabricated by mixing magnetic particles with silicone polymers, which is then magnetized by a specific magnetic field. The prototypes can be actuated by an external magnetic field (5–8 mT) produced by custom-made electromagnetic coils. Experimental results show that the soft robot can move at a high speed in the range of 0.536–1.604 mm/s on different surfaces, including paper, wood, and PMMA. This indicates that the soft robot can achieve comparable speeds to other robots, while being driven by a lower magnitude, resulting in energy savings. Furthermore, it achieves a high speed of 0.823 mm/s on the surface of a pig colon. The fine capabilities of the soft robot in terms of crossing uneven biological surfaces and carrying external loads are demonstrated. The results indicate that the reported soft robot exhibits promising applications in the biomedical field.
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spelling pubmed-103769722023-07-29 Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field Xu, Ruomeng Xu, Qingsong Biomimetics (Basel) Article Inspired by insects in nature, an increasing number of soft robots have been proposed to mimic their locomotion patterns. As a wireless actuation method, the magnetic actuation technique has been widely applied to drive soft magnetic robots for diverse applications. Although recent works on soft materials have stimulated the development of soft robots, it is challenging to achieve the efficient movement of soft robots for in vivo biomedical application. Inspired by centipede locomotion, a soft octopodal robot is designed in this paper. The robot is fabricated by mixing magnetic particles with silicone polymers, which is then magnetized by a specific magnetic field. The prototypes can be actuated by an external magnetic field (5–8 mT) produced by custom-made electromagnetic coils. Experimental results show that the soft robot can move at a high speed in the range of 0.536–1.604 mm/s on different surfaces, including paper, wood, and PMMA. This indicates that the soft robot can achieve comparable speeds to other robots, while being driven by a lower magnitude, resulting in energy savings. Furthermore, it achieves a high speed of 0.823 mm/s on the surface of a pig colon. The fine capabilities of the soft robot in terms of crossing uneven biological surfaces and carrying external loads are demonstrated. The results indicate that the reported soft robot exhibits promising applications in the biomedical field. MDPI 2023-06-22 /pmc/articles/PMC10376972/ /pubmed/37504157 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8030269 Text en © 2023 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Xu, Ruomeng
Xu, Qingsong
Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field
title Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field
title_full Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field
title_fullStr Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field
title_full_unstemmed Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field
title_short Design of a Bio-Inspired Untethered Soft Octopodal Robot Driven by Magnetic Field
title_sort design of a bio-inspired untethered soft octopodal robot driven by magnetic field
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10376972/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37504157
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics8030269
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AT xuqingsong designofabioinspireduntetheredsoftoctopodalrobotdrivenbymagneticfield