Design Methodology for Soft-Bodied Miniature Robot Locomotion

微型软材料机器人不受束缚，整体尺寸小到几毫米甚至亚毫米，需要具有多种运动模式，以便在人体内部等复杂环境中导航。这种用于医疗的微型软体机器人将能够以最小的入侵进入以前难以到达或无法进入的人体部位，并安全精确地实施医疗手术。为了创造这种用于医疗用途的新型微型软体机器，本研究项目旨在开发一种系统的方法来设计、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。为了实现这一目标，我们在本提案中的研究目标包括三个迭代步骤。在第一步，我们将设计软体机器人来模拟各种小型软体动物的不同运动模式。我们将从直观的机器人设计开始，然后开发一种计算方法，系统地搜索次优机器人设计。下一步，为了实现第一步中生成的软体机器人设计，我们将显著推进目前基于磁性软材料的微型软体机器人的制造技术，并开发一种制造三维几何形状和磁化曲线的方法。在最后一步，我们将测试和表征实现的运动模式，以评估其性能，并验证开发的运动动态模型。在此步骤中收集的知识将作为指导，在接下来的迭代中改进软体微型机器人的设计及其整体多模态运动性能。

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.