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Meet 'microTUM' - Tumbling, Magnetic Microbot for Biomedical Injectables

Purdue University  's 'microscale magnetic tumbling robot,' or microTUM, is smaller than the head of a pin. A continuously rotating magnetic field propels the microbot in a tumbling motion, which helps the microbot traverse uneven surfaces in both dry and wet environments. The flat, dumbbell-shaped microbot is made of a polymer and has two magnetic ends. The Purdue University team envisions biomedical micro-robots being injected into patients for super-focused drug delivery.

Topics:
Materials Medical Motion Control Power

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 We do research in micro robotics here in the lab. We try to study small scale robots, typically less than a millimeter in size. How do we design them? How do we control them? How do we program them to do something useful? With our robots it's kind of like an all-terrain micro robot. So we can go over these rough surfaces. They can be dry, which is a big challenge in the field. They can be wet, they can be sticky. And we can just roll over these these terrains and get to where we need to be. When you're trying to drive a car over rough terrain, what do you do? You put big tires on your car, like an all-terrain vehicle, and it can roll over those those complex surfaces. So we started to take the same approach here with a micro robot design, see if we could design a robot which could roll

    00:00:37 over these complex surfaces. So the magnetic properties of the robot would allow it to rotate inside a rotating magnetic field, as opposed to a gradient field. And now it can rotate and tumble over these rough terrains. If you want to steer the robot, we can actually stand it up, and then we can control a field in the plane in order to rotate it, and then continue on with it rotating, so we've done different trajectories of the robot. We envision these robots being injected to the patient. Inside the body, you have complex sticky terrains, like tissue. You can imagine these robots maybe being in the stomach somewhere. Your MRI system that you have in the hospitals uses magnetic fields, so you could use a commercial MRI system to control these robots. We could have them tumble to

    00:01:18 their goal location, where they need to be, and then inside the body of the robot we can embed a payload, which could be a drug payload, which could automatically be released at a target location. I think micro robotics is a really neat and challenging field. It's exciting. We see a lot of potential breakthroughs in the field, especially in the medical regime. We can use these to help people's lives be better, fight cancer, fight other diseases, and so it's exciting to be a part of that.