Automated Fabrication of Magnetic Soft Microrobots

Abstract

The advent of 3D printing has revolutionized many industries and has had similar improvements for soft robots. However, many challenges persist for these functional devices. Magnetic soft robots require the addition of magnetic particles that must be correctly oriented. There is a significant gap in the automated fabrication of 3D geometric structures with 3D magnetization direction. A fully automated 3D printer was designed to improve accuracy, speed, and reproducibility. This design was able to achieve a circular spot size (voxels) of 1.6mm in diameter. An updated optical system can improve the resolution to a square spot size of 50$\mu$m by 50$\mu$m. The new system achieves higher resolution designs as shown through magneto-mechanical simulations. Various microrobots including 'worm', 'gripper' and 'zipper' designs are evaluated with the new spot size.