Path planning and aggregation for a microrobot swarm in vascular networks using a global input

摘要

Microrobots have great potential for microassembly and non-invasive surgery applications. Motivated by studies proposing MRI-guided drug delivery to tumor cells using magnetic micro carriers, this paper studies two major challenges of this problem: (i) microrobot swarm trajectory generation, and (ii) swarm aggregation using a global input. We propose an augmented RRT for trajectory generation to reduce environment interference, and a divide-and-conquer algorithm for swarm aggregation to improve performance. Simulations demonstrate the utility of these approaches in comparison to alternate heuristics. Our trajectory generation and aggregation strategies are implemented on a swarm of ferromagnetic microparticles in oil using a 6-coil electromagnetic system with image feedback.