Wireless Swimming Microrobot: Design, Analysis, and Experiments

This paper presents a bidirectional wireless swimming microrobot that has been developed, analyzed, and experimentally tested. The robot is developed based on fin beating propulsion, using giant magnetostrictive films for head and tail fins. An innovative drive approach, using separate second order resonance frequencies of the head and tail fins to generate forward and backward thrusts, is proposed and implemented on a bidirectional swimming microrobot prototype. Dynamic model of the proposed microrobot has been derived based on theoretical analysis. Simulation and experimental results have demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed drive approach and design. The developed swimming microrobot features a low driving frequency, low power consumption, and a large range of swimming speed in both the forward and backward directions.