Collision-free Navigation of Magnetic Mobile Microrobot in Multiple Scenarios

Microrobot has been developed for the manipulation of micro- and nanoscale objects for many biological and manufacturing tasks. However, there are still challenges in the collision-free operation of microrobots in multiple scenarios. Essential functions, such as path planning and autonomous and adaptive navigation in dynamic environments, are urgently needed to implement microrobots in practical scenarios. Here, we implement path planning and the autonomous navigation of microrobots in 2D static obstacle scenarios and micro-mazes. A probabilistic-based RRT algorithm is employed to speed up the path search in static obstacle scenarios. The Dijkstra algorithm is employed in the micro-maze navigation of the microrobot to avoid the narrow and long pipeline effect. To further ease the active manipulation of magnetic mobile microrobots, a handle-based interactive operation is developed to realize the operational tasks in the three-dimensional space based on artificial vision planning and navigation, which improves the interactivity and flexibility of the system, and supplements the current limitation of autonomous navigation on the three-dimensional space.