A Two-Dimensional Magnetic Gripper Robot Driven by a Triad of Electromagnetic Coils

Author / Creator

MMM 2020 (2020)

Conferences

MMM 2020 Q5: Biomedical Applications IV (2020)

Available as

Online

Summary

Magnetically actuated micro- or milli-scale gripper robots have been widely studied as a promising means to manipulate a variety of small objects, such as biological cells, medical drugs, and other...

Magnetically actuated micro- or milli-scale gripper robots have been widely studied as a promising means to manipulate a variety of small objects, such as biological cells, medical drugs, and other functional materials, in an untethered and uncontaminated manner [1-3]. In this research, we propose a magnetic gripper robot (MGR) composed of a simple flexible body with three permanent magnets inserted into different parts of the body (Fig. 1). A cube magnet is fixed into the base of the flexible body, whereas two freely rotatable cylindrical magnets are inserted into each gripper arm of the body. Without an external magnetic field, the two cylindrical magnets in the gripper arm tend to align in the same lateral direction, which can make the MGR form a closed posture due to the attractive magnetic force. Under a specific magnetic field, on the other hand, the two magnets may align into a vertical direction parallel to the fixed magnet, in which the MGR can make an open posture due to the repulsive magnetic force. In this research, we derived an equation that can calculate the equilibrium postures of the MGR's magnets under an external magnetic field and the corresponding structural deformation of the flexible body by using the MGR's magnetic and elastic potential energy (Fig. 1). From this equation, we could establish a method to generate the MGR's gripper motions and its two-dimensional (2D) translational motion at the same time by using an efficient coil system comprised of only a triad of electromagnetic coils (TEC) shown in Fig. 2a [4]. We then fabricated a prototype MGR and a TEC to demonstrate the proposed MGR's gripper motions such as the pick-and-place motions shown in Fig. 2. The results showed that the proposed MGR could play a role as an effective untethered gripper which can be utilized for various biomedical purposes such as cell manipulation, drug delivery, biopsy, etc.References: [1] T. R. Ger, H. T. Huang, W. Y. Chen, and M. F. Lai, Lab on a Chip, Vol. 13, p. 2364-2369 (2013) [2] E. Diller and M. Sitti, Advanced Functional Materials, Vol. 24, p. 4397-4404 (2014) [3] T. Xu, J. Zhang, M. Salehizadeh, O. Onaizah, E. Diller, Science Robotics, Vol. 4 (2019) [4] H. J. Lee and S. M. Jeon, AIP Advances, Vol. 10 (2020)

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