Analysis and Comparison of Electromagnetic Microrobotic Platforms for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Magnetic microrobotics is a promising technology for improving minimally invasive surgery (MIS) with the ambition of enhancing patient care and comfort. The potential benefits include limited incisions, less hemorrhaging and postoperative pain, and faster recovery time. To achieve this, a key issue relies on the design of a proper electromagnetic actuation (EMA) setup which is based on the use of magnetic sources. The magnetic field and its gradient generated by the EMA platform is then used to induce magnetic torque and force for microrobot manipulations inside the human body. Like any control systems, the EMA system must be adapted to the given controlled microrobot and customized for the application. With great research efforts on magnetic manipulating of microrobots, the EMA systems are approaching commercial applications, and their configurations are becoming more suitable to be employed in real medical surgeries. However, most of the proposed designs have not followed any specific rule allowing to take into account the biomedical applications constraints. Through reviewing the different proposed EMA systems in the literature, their various specifications and configurations are comprehensively discussed and analyzed. This study focus on EMA platforms that use electromagnets. From this review and based on the biomedical application specifications, the appropriate EMA system can be determined efficiently.

Bio-Inspired Micro- and Nanorobotics Driven by Magnetic Field

“…Particular attention has been paid to the latest advances in the rapidly developing field of magnetic composite design and bioinspired structure fabrication. The bioinspired miniature magnetic structures described in the present review offer highly promising tools for a number of applications, especially biomedical ones [ 48 , 49 ].…”

Optimal Design of a Multipole-Electromagnet Robotic Platform for Ophthalmic Surgery

“…To this end, a reliable and effective electromagnetic actuation (EMA) setup should be designed with respect to the medical applications objectives. In previous researches [ 2 , 3 ], the magnetic source generation, the minimum number of electromagnets for an EMA system and the optimization methodology for the configuration of electromagnets have been fully studied for different common applications. This previous work showed that the EMA optimal design is strongly related to the considered application.…”

“…However, with a fixed configuration of their coils, OctoMag or MiniMag cannot be easily adapted to different application contexts. Therefore, here, we focus on the optimization and implementation of an EMA platform using the methodology proposed in [ 3 ] with the initial motivation of applying it to ophthalmic minimally invasive surgery (MIS) using medical magnetic microrobots that have to achieve various tasks. Through the theoretical analysis of system design, a robotic microrobotic EMA platform named OctoRob with a re-configurable setting was developed.…”

“…Ophthalmology and ophthalmic surgery challenges and opportunities are first discussed, and the requirements of the considered application are thereby specified. The overall concept of the designed EMA system is represented according to the given specifications stated in [ 3 , 18 ]. A set of electromagnetic coils is firstly investigated, including its magnetic core and its optimal dimensions.…”

“…The kinematic mechanism is then analyzed. The robotic arm is integrated in order to optimize the performance of dexterity of magnetic fields and gradients, as introduced in [ 2 , 3 ]. Finally, we describe the building of the designed prototype from the ophthalmic application specifications.…”