Kresling Origami-Based, Magnetically Actuated Crawling Robot for Drug Delivery
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Date
2021-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
Origami has recently been applied in fields such as metamaterials, aerospace engineering, and biomedical engineering. All these applications take advantage of origami structures' ability to deploy and change shapes easily while being lightweight and compact. In the field of biomedicine, small origami structures have been researched for applications like disease diagnosis, drug delivery, and minimally invasive surgery. However, these soft origami machines face difficulties when navigating through highly confined or viscous areas in the body. The Kresling origami pattern can be useful in addressing this issue as it has several important properties ideal for functioning inside of the body. Namely, it has an anisotropic stiffness characteristic that allows it to withstand lateral resistance while still deforming in the axial direction, and it naturally has an internal space where medical supply could be stored safely. The goal of this research was to construct and characterize a Kresling origami-based crawling robot that is untethered and compact. The robot has magnetically responsive materials installed on it and is controlled via electromagnets. Magnetic actuation separates the power source and controller from the actuator, which untethers the robot and reduces the number of constituent parts. By manipulating the applied magnetic field strength and direction, the robot can be controlled as desired. The resulting Kresling origami robot in this research can fit within a 1 cm by 1 cm by 3 cm volume, weighs about 1 gram, and can be controlled freely in the horizontal plane by applying magnetic fields of up to 40 mT in strength. It can crawl within a confined space comprised of mimicked human tissue layers. Additionally, it has been demonstrated to successfully store and release a water-soluble dye which simulates drug delivery. Characterization of the robot involved determining how parameters of the magnetic field profile affects performance such as the speed and stride length.
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Keywords
Kresling, origami, drug delivery, magnetic material, soft robotics