Steering control of magnetic helical swimmers in swirling flows due to confinement

Çaldağ, Hakan Osman and Yeşilyurt, Serhat (2020) Steering control of magnetic helical swimmers in swirling flows due to confinement. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Paris, France

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Abstract

Artificial microswimmers are prospective robotic agents especially in biomedical applications. A rotating magnetic field can actuate a magnetized swimmer with a helical tail and enable propulsion. Such swimmers exhibit several modes of instability. Inside conduits, for example, hydrodynamic interactions with the boundaries lead to helical paths for pusher-mode swimmers; in this mode the helical tail pushes a rotating magnetic head. State-of-the-art in controlled navigation of microswimmers is based on aligning the swimmer orientation according to a reference path, thereby requiring both swimmer orientation and position to be known. Object-orientation is hard to track especially in in vivo scenarios which render orientationbased methods practically unfeasible. Here, we show that the kinematics for a confined swimmer can be linearized by assuming a low wobbling angle. This allows for a control law solely based on the swimmer position. The approach is demonstrated through experiments and two different numerical models: the first is based on the resistive force theory for a swimmer inside a swirling flow represented by a forced vortex and the second is a computational fluid dynamics model, which solves Stokes equations for a swimmer inside a circular channel. Helical pusher-mode trajectories are suppressed significantly for the straight path following problem. The error in real-life experiments remains comparable to those in the state-of-the-art methods.
Item Type: Papers in Conference Proceedings
Subjects: T Technology > TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery > TJ210.2-211.47 Mechanical devices and figures. Automata. Ingenious mechanisms. Robots (General)
T Technology > TJ Mechanical engineering and machinery > TJ163.12 Mechatronics
Divisions: Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences > Academic programs > Mechatronics
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences
Depositing User: Hakan Osman Çaldağ
Date Deposited: 18 Sep 2020 18:26
Last Modified: 04 Aug 2023 14:04
URI: https://research.sabanciuniv.edu/id/eprint/40089

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