Recently, the research paper of Professor Wang Heng's team from our school was published in 'Nature Communications' (Paper link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-42783-5), proposing a novel soft magnetic actuation method for the dexterous manipulation of microrobots. Additionally, this paper was recommended by the editors as a highlighted article in the 'Applied Physics and Mathematics' field (Top 50 best papers in the field). The first author of the paper is Professor Wang Heng, the co-first author is Cui Junhao, a master's student from our school (Class of 2022), and other authors include Tian Kuan, an undergraduate student (Class of 2020), and Han Yuxiang, a master's student (Class of 2023).

Magnetic actuation is widely used for the wireless control of miniature medical robots in complex internal bodily environments. Most current magnetic actuation systems use permanent magnets as the actuating force components on the robots. However, due to the inability to generate a magnetic torque around the direction of the permanent magnet's magnetic moment, only two degrees of freedom in attitude control can be achieved for permanent magnet robots, which greatly limits the dexterity of magnetic actuation robots. The paper introduces a novel magnetic actuation method based on soft magnetic bodies, which by designing the geometric shape of the soft magnetic body (i.e., a tri-axial non-equilateral shape, such as a tri-axial ellipsoid), achieves anisotropic magnetization of the soft magnetic body. This can generate three degrees of freedom in torque, thus realizing the dexterous control of the three degrees of freedom in attitude of the soft magnetic robot. The paper elucidates and experimentally validates the mechanism of generating three degrees of freedom in torque for the soft magnetic robot, studies the hierarchical stability of the soft magnetic robot rotating around different axes in an external magnetic field, and consequently proposes an open-loop attitude control strategy for alternately regulating the orientation of the longest axis of the ellipsoidal soft magnet and rotation around the longest axis. This achieves dexterous control over the three degrees of freedom in the attitude of the microrobot, solving the bottleneck problem of full six degrees of freedom dexterous magnetic actuation for microrobots.

“Nature Communications” is an open-access comprehensive scientific journal that aims to publish high-level research in biology, physics, chemistry, earth sciences, mathematics, sociology, as well as applied and engineering sciences. It is a journal included in the Nature Index with an impact factor of 16.6. (Image/Text by School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, South China University of Technology).