Comparing swimming performances of flexible and helical magnetic swimmers

Ali Oulmas , Johan E Quispe (1) , Nicolas Andreff , Stéphane Régnier

1 ISIR - Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique

Flexible and helical magnetic microswimmers have been well reviewed in the literature because they could be exploited for envisaged applications such as targeted drug delivery, material removal, and micromanipulation. In this article, scaled-up versions of those robots are introduced to study in detail their maneuverability and dexterity while swimming. The robots were immersed in pure glycerol, thus, reproducing a low Reynolds scenario. The proposed robots were previously optimized, achieving their best performances. These magnetic swimmers have different actuation mode and geometric shape. The experiments assess the performances of these two kinds of robots in terms of rapidity, and steering error while following 3D trajectories in environments with high viscous variations.

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique; Automatique / Robotique

Ali Oulmas, Johan E Quispe, Nicolas Andreff, Stéphane Régnier. Comparing swimming performances of flexible and helical magnetic swimmers. 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Nov 2019, Macau, France. pp.2415-2420, ⟨10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968485⟩. ⟨hal-03391484⟩