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Abstract. This chapter covers some fundamental work towards realizing functional mobile magnetic microrobots. First, the theoretical fundamentals of electromagnetism are presented. Second, an electromagnetic testbed design for controlling mobile magnetic microrobots is described. It is utilized to perform benchmarking tests on a simple I-bar shaped magnetic microrobot design. After benchmarking, the critical aspects for micro scale robots and two specific microrobot designs are developed addressing the application needs of biomedical and micro manufacturing tasks. They exhibit tumbling and crawling locomotion mechanisms, respectively. Finally, a magnet microrobot body and vision-based force sensor end-effector combination illustrates an approach for combining different technologies together to create the truly functional mobile magnetic microrobots of the future. Keywords: magnetic microrobotics, micro-force sensing.

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Introduction Motivation

The features and traits of tiny robots hold great promise in biomedical and manufacturing applications. In biology, manipulation at the cellular level is always a critical and challenging task, especially when manipulating live cells during in vivo tasks. Also for the medical applications, there is a desire for tools on the small scale for minimal and non-invasive surgery. Micro scale robots are also needed for advanced micro manufacturing, especially in bottom-up additive manufacturing scenarios. Micro parts typically require operations like handling, sorting, positioning and assembly. Untethered micro agents have the potential to demonstrate advantages in executing these tasks in enclosed incapacious workspaces. Driven by these practical needs, efforts have been conducted towards functional magnetic micro scale robots that are more than pure permanent magnetic bodies and can exhibit advanced functions beyond simple locomotion. The research community is still far away from realizing a micro scale robot that can perform a complex microsurgical or manufacturing tasks with on-board sensing, actuation, and intelligence. However, this allows for many opportunities for new I. Paprotny and S. Bergbreiter (Eds.): Small-Scale Robotics 2013, LNAI 8336, pp. 81–100, 2014. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 

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W. Jing and D.J. Cappelleri

ideas and approaches in order to make this a reality in the future. This chapter presents the intial efforts towards creating truly functional magnetic mobile microrobots for biomedical and manufacturing applications. 1.2

Related Work

Since actuation is still a significant challenge for micro scale robots, a major portion of recent research efforts are addressed on the power delivery and working mechanism for microrobots in order to derive mobility and controllability. Autonomous robots on the macro scale are powered by engines, motors, etc., which consume fuel or electricity. At present, these on-board power methods can not be shrunk down to the micro scale, i.e. smaller than 1 mm. Since there are no on-board power sources on that small sca