Design Methodology for Soft-Bodied Miniature Robot Locomotion

微型软材料机器人是不受束缚的，总尺寸小到几毫米甚至亚毫米大小，需要有多种运动模式才能在复杂的环境中导航，比如在人体内部。这种面向医疗用途的微型软机器人将能够以最小的创伤进入以前难以到达或无法到达的人体部位，并安全而准确地实施医疗手术。为了创造这种新型的医用微型软体机器人，本研究项目旨在开发一套系统的方法来设计、制造和验证使用磁性软弹性体材料的具有多模式运动能力的微型软体移动机器人。在第一步中，我们将设计软体机器人来模拟各种小型软体动物执行不同运动模式的运动学。我们将从直观的机器人设计开始，然后开发一种计算方法，系统地搜索次优的机器人设计。在下一步，为了实现第一步产生的软体机器人设计，我们将大幅提高现有的基于磁性软材料的微型软机器人的制造技术，并开发一种制造三维几何形状和磁化轮廓的方法。在最后一步中，我们将对所实现的运动模式进行测试和表征，以评估其性能，并验证所开发的运动动力学模型。在这一步中收集到的知识将作为指导，在下一次迭代中改进软体微型机器人的设计及其整体多模式运动性能。

Miniature soft material robots, which are untethered and small in overall size down to a few millimetre and even sub-millimeter size scale, are required to have multiple locomotion modes to navigate in complex environments, such as inside the human body. Such miniature soft robots toward medical use will be able to access to previously hard-to-reach or inaccessible human body sites with minimal invasion and implement medical operations safely and precisely. To create such novel miniature soft machines toward medical use, this research project aims to develop a systematic methodology for design, fabrication, and validation of miniature soft-bodied mobile robots with multimodal locomotion capabilities using magnetic soft elastomeric materials.To achieve such goal, our research objective in this proposal consists of three iterative steps. In the first step, we will design the soft-bodied robots to mimic the kinematics of different locomotion modes executed by various small-scale soft-bodied animals. We will start with an intuitive robot design and then develop a computational methodology that will systematically search for sub-optimal robot designs. In the next step, to realize the soft-bodied robot designs generated in the first step, we will advance the current fabrication techniques significantly for magnetic soft materials-based miniature soft robots and develop a method to fabricate three-dimensional geometries and magnetization profiles. In the final step, we will test and characterize achieved locomotion modes to assess their performance and also validate the developed locomotion dynamic models. The knowledge gathered in this step will be used as a guideline to improve design of the soft-bodied miniature robots and their overall multimodal locomotion performance in the next iterations.