Visual Servoing of Miniature Magnetic Film Swimming Robots for 3-D Arbitrary Path Following

Abstract

Soft swimming microrobots that can be powered and guided remotely by magnetic field show greater potential for numerous applications than traditional rigid counterparts, due to their soft and flexible architectures. However, main challenges in closed-loop control remain to be overcome for the soft robots to reach the accuracy and repeatability in applications. This letter proposes a closed-loop control method of soft swimming microrobots for three-dimensional (3-D) arbitrary path following at low Reynolds numbers by visual servoing, where the path curve is divided into a series of line segments. Different complicated paths drawn by users through a 3-D mouse without the input of parametric equations are followed by swimming robots during experiments. The control method with friendly user interaction and good performance is able to be integrated easily into any generic purposely non-holonomic robots.