3-D locomotive and drilling microrobot using novel stationary EMA system

For 3-D locomotion and drilling of a microrobot, we proposed an electromagnetic actuation (EMA) system consisting of three pairs of stationary Helmholtz coils, a pair of stationary Maxwell coils, and a pair of rotating Maxwell coils in the previous research. However, this system could have limited medical applications because of the pair of rotational Maxwell coils. In this paper, we propose a new EMA system with three pairs of stationary Helmholtz coils, a pair of stationary Maxwell coils, and a new locomotive mechanism for the same 3-D locomotion and drilling of the microrobot as achieved by the previously proposed EMA system. For the performance evaluation of the proposed EMA system, we perform a 3-D locomotion and drilling test in a blood vessel phantom. In addition, the two EMA systems are compared to show that the newly proposed EMA system has 440% wider working space and 49% less power consumption than the previous EMA system.