High-Fidelity 3D Printing of Programmable Magnetic Soft Robots

Abstract

Magnetic microrobots are an increasingly popular area of research with a wide range of potential applications including healthcare. These microrobots can be remotely controlled using an external magnetic field to perform various motions such as jumping, swimming, crawling, rolling, and grabbing. This allows for intricate tasks such as drug delivery, stent placements, and wound patching. However, fabricating microrobots is a challenging multi-step process that can take several hours or even days. Therefore, it is important to have an accurate, reproducible, and automated fabrication method. In this study, an existing fully automated stereolithography printer is tested to fabricate magnetic soft robots with voxel sizes smaller than a millimeter. The work focuses on updating the optics to create a smaller spot size (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$803 \mu ~\mathrm{m}$</tex>) with more uniform curing distributions using a near ultraviolet beam shaper. The updated optics system in the printer is then used to print two microrobots: 'the beam' and 'the gripper' that are functionally tested using an externally applied magnetic field.