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Fundamentals and Field-Driven Control of Micro-/Nanorobots

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Field-Driven Micro and Nanorobots for Biology and Medicine

Abstract

The present chapter discusses the control design of MRI-guided robots in the vasculature to achieve targeted therapy through precise drug delivery. Such robots consist of a polymer-bonded aggregate of nanosized ferromagnetic and drug particles that can be propelled by the gradient coils of an MRI device. The feasibility of the concept has been largely studied in the literature, but few works address the nonlinear control issues related to a fine modeling of the forces acting on the magnetic microrobot. In this chapter, a fine modeling is developed with concerns about the constraints of the application. The notion of optimal trajectory derived from the nonlinear model is presented and shows that one can exploit the complexity of such a model to optimize the tracking performances. Then, different theoretical approaches to design nonlinear controllers with nonlinear observers are proposed, e.g., (a) Lyapunov controller with an adaptive backstepping law, (b) model predictive control (MPC), and (c) optimal control using linear quadratic integral (LQI) controller. The benefits of this fine modeling and the use of advanced control law and observer are illustrated by simulations and experimental results. Finally, perspectives and open problems in the field of MRI-guided robots’ control are discussed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. INSA Centre Val de Loire – Université d’Orléans, PRISME, Bourges, France

    Antoine Ferreira

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  1. Antoine Ferreira
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Correspondence to Antoine Ferreira .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Yu Sun

  2. Program in Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre, The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Xian Wang

  3. Shenzhen Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics for Society, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

    Jiangfan Yu

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Ferreira, A. (2022). Fundamentals and Field-Driven Control of Micro-/Nanorobots. In: Sun, Y., Wang, X., Yu, J. (eds) Field-Driven Micro and Nanorobots for Biology and Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80197-7_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80197-7_1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-80196-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-80197-7

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