Award Abstract # 1435827
Collaborative Research: Shepherding Biomedical Microswimmers Using Magnetic Fields

NSF Org: CMMI
Div Of Civil, Mechanical, & Manufact Inn
Recipient: UNIVERSITY OF UTAH
Initial Amendment Date: June 30, 2014
Latest Amendment Date: May 8, 2017
Award Number: 1435827
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Irina Dolinskaya
idolinsk@nsf.gov
 (703)292-7078
CMMI
 Div Of Civil, Mechanical, & Manufact Inn
ENG
 Directorate For Engineering
Start Date: August 15, 2014
End Date: February 28, 2019 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $230,427.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $248,427.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2014 = $230,427.00
FY 2015 = $5,000.00

FY 2016 = $5,000.00

FY 2017 = $8,000.00
History of Investigator:
  • Jake Abbott (Principal Investigator)
    jake.abbott@utah.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: University of Utah
201 PRESIDENTS CIR
SALT LAKE CITY
UT  US  84112-9049
(801)581-6903
Sponsor Congressional District: 01
Primary Place of Performance: University of Utah
UT  US  84112-8930
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
01
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): LL8GLEVH6MG3
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Dynamics, Control and System D
Primary Program Source: 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01001516DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001617DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01001718DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 034E, 035E, 036E, 116E, 8024, 9150, 9178, 9231, 9251
Program Element Code(s): 7569
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.041

ABSTRACT

Biomedical microrobots have the potential to be functionalized to perform therapies in the body, such as chemotherapy and hyperthermia, which are targeted in a small region to avoid damage to healthy surrounding tissue and to avoid side-effects. These "microrobots" are likely to be microstructures with no computational intelligence on board, which are controlled within the patient's body by magnetic fields generated outside the body. Much of the work on magnetic microrobots to date has focused on microswimmers that use a helical propeller to swim using a method inspired by bacteria. However, promising laboratory results to date have utilized small numbers of microswimmers and have relied on imaging techniques such as cameras to track individual microswimmers, which is not practical for medical applications. This award supports fundamental research to enable swarms of microswimmers to be controlled in a complex fashion, in the absence of medical images with enough resolution to track individual microswimmers. The outcome of this award will be knowledge that will bring minimally invasive biomedical microrobots one step closer to clinical reality. The award will also provide research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, and will broaden participation of underrepresented groups in engineering education.

This research will test the conjecture that the inherent dynamics of magnetic microswimmers in rotating magnetic dipole fields make it possible to shepherd a swarm of microswimmers in the absence of localization of individuals. The term "shepherding" is borrowed because the intent is to perform the same type of tasks that would be done when herding sheep. The goal is to develop basic manipulation primitives such as "move the aggregate swarm to a location," "spread out the swarm," "gather the swarm together," and "split the swarm into smaller swarms and move them to separate locations." Specific tasks include: modeling the dynamics of single swimmers; characterizing shepherding control primitives assuming identical and non-interacting swimmers; characterizing shepherding control primitives that take advantage of population variation within a swarm; modeling magnetic and hydrodynamic interactions between swimmers; and synthesizing the relative contribution of the above effects to enable complex shepherding maneuvers with actual swarms of magnetic microswimmers.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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J. J. Abbott "Parametric Design of Tri-axial Nested Helmholtz Coils" Review of Scientific Instruments , v.86 , 2015 , p.054701
J. J. Abbott and H. C. Fu "Controlling Homogeneous Microrobot Swarms In Vivo Using Rotating Magnetic Dipole Fields" International Symposium of Robotics Research , 2017
T. A. Howell, B. Osting, and J. J. Abbott "Sorting Rotating Micromachines by Variations in Their Magnetic Properties" Physical Review Applied , v.9 , 2018 , p.054021 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.9.054021
N. D. Nelson and J. J. Abbott "Generating Two Independent Rotating Magnetic Fields with a Single Magnetic Dipole for the Propulsion of Untethered Magnetic Devices" IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation , 2015 , p.4056
Chaluvadi, BhanuKiran and Stewart, Kristen M. and Sperry, Adam J. and Fu, Henry C. and Abbott, Jake J. "Kinematic Model of a Magnetic-Microrobot Swarm in a Rotating Magnetic Dipole Field" IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters , v.5 , 2020 10.1109/LRA.2020.2972857 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

Magnetically controlled microrobots hold great potential for use in minimally invasive medicine, particularly for targeted delivery of therapies such as drugs or heat. These so-called "microrobots" are actually just simple corkscrew-like structures, with all of the robotic intelligence being contained in the external magnetic system that is used to control them. Research on the control of magnetic microrobots has typically either considered a very small set of microrobots that are individual tracked and controlled under a microscope, or a small "swarm" of microrobots that are controlled as a single unit with no ability to differentiate individual microrobots. For medical applications, it will be likely be necessary to inject a large of number of microrobots into the patient, and then control that swarm to the desired location(s) in the patient's body. It may be necessary to perform additional actions on the swarm beyond simply moving it from one location to another. In this project, the investigators developed methods to perform a variety of actions on such a swarm, using rotating magnetic fields. The actions include gathering the swarm together such that the microrobots are more concentrated, spreading the swarm out such that the microrobots are less concentrated, moving the swarm as a unit without substantially changing the concentration, and sorting the swarm (for example, separate the swarm into two new smaller swarms, with one comprising 30% of the original swarm and the other comprising 70% of the original swarm). The results of this project bring our collective understanding of biomedical microrobotics one step closer to translation to clinical use.


Last Modified: 07/01/2019
Modified by: Jake Abbott

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