Selective Motion Control of a Crawling Magnetic Robot System for Wireless Self-Expandable Stent Delivery in Narrowed Tubular Environments

A novel crawling magnetic robot system manipulated by a magnetic navigation system is proposed for wireless self-expandable stent delivery in narrowed tubular environments. The crawling magnetic robot is composed of a crawling module to generate crawling motion for navigation in a tubular environment, and a magnetic pulley module to generate drilling motion to unclog the blocked region and uncovering motion of a stent cover for the self-expandable stent deployment. The magnetic navigation system composed of three orthogonal pairs of electromagnetic coils can generate three dimensional external magnetic field by controlling the applied current. We also proposed selective motion control methods and design processes with fabrication. Finally, we prototyped the proposed crawling magnetic robot and conducted several experiments to show the validity of the proposed crawling magnetic robot and its manipulation methods.