Untethered microgripper-the dexterous hand at microscale
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Untethered microgripper-the dexterous hand at microscale Chao Yin 1 & Fanan Wei 1,2
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Ziheng Zhan 1 & Jianghong Zheng 1 & Ligang Yao 1 & Wenguang Yang 3 & Minglin Li 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Untethered microgrippers that can navigate in hard-to-reach and unpredictable environments are significantly important for biomedical applications such as targeted drug delivery, micromanipulation, minimally invasive surgery and in vivo biopsy. Compared with the traditional tethered microgrippers, the wireless microgrippers, due to the exceptional characteristics such as miniaturized size, untethered actuation, dexterous and autonomous motion, are projected to be promising microtools in various future applications. In this review, we categorize the untethered microgrippers into five major classes, i.e. microgrippers responsive to thermal, microgrippers actuated by magnetic fields, microgrippers responsive to chemicals, light-driven microgrippers and hybrid actuated microgrippers. Firstly, the actuation mechanisms of these microgrippers are introduced. The challenges faced by these microgrippers are also covered in this part. With that, the fabrication methods of these microgrippers are summarized. Subsequently, the applications of microgrippers are presented. Additionally, we conduct a comparison among different actuation mechanisms to explore the advantages and potential challenges of various types of microgrippers. In the end of this review, conclusions and outlook of the development and potential applications of the microgrippers are discussed. Keywords Untethered . Microgripper . Stimuli-responsive . Biomedicine
1 Introduction With the urgent demand from social economy and rapid development of science and technology, robots are becoming ever-increasingly prevalent in our daily life, and their role is turning more and more important (Bragança et al. 2019; Malle 2016; Conti et al. 2016). Large-sized robots have a significant effect on improving the efficiency of industrial production, and they are becoming progressively intelligent. At the same time, small-scaled robots, especially at the micron level, named microrobots, are gradually showing their potential in different fields (Yang et al. 2018). For example, inspired by the nature, some magnetic field actuated microrobots have
* Fanan Wei [email protected] 1
School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China
2
State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China
3
School of Electromechanical and Automotive Engineering, Yantai University, Yantai, China
been reported in recent years, such as the magnetically propelled fish-like nanoswimmers (Li et al. 2016a) and the ribbon-like magnetic microswarm (Yu et al. 2018). Moreover, with the noninvasive remote actuation and convenient navigation abilities of magnetic propulsion, various types of highly efficient magnetic microdevices are emerging (Li et al. 2017a
