Motion Control Simulations for a Magnetically-Coupled Bacterium and Robotic Arm
This work addresses control challenges in minimally invasive medicine for bio-hybrid microswimmers, but it is incremental as it focuses on simulations of a specific scenario.
The study tackled the problem of controlling a bio-hybrid microswimmer, specifically a magnetotactic bacterium, using a robotic arm with non-contact maneuvering, and demonstrated that the system could adjust the microswimmer's heading near a 2D boundary with a time-dependent error to the yaw-angle reference under PID control with adaptive integral gain.
The demonstrations of micro-robotic systems in minimally invasive medicine include an individual or a swarm of microswimmer of various origin, artificial or biohybrid, often with an external computer-controlled electromagnetic field. There are several in vivo and in vitro control performances with artificial microswimmers but control of a bio-hybrid microswimmer using an open kinematic chain remains untouched. In this work, non-contact maneuvering control of a single magnetotactic bacterium cell is simulated. The results show that the proposed system is capable of adjusting the heading of the microswimmer moving at proximity to a 2D boundary under the guidance of the set-point tracking scheme. The performance of the coupled model and the sensitivity to control parameters are demonstrated with the help of a time-dependent error to the yaw-angle reference under the influence of PID with adaptive integral gain.