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8500704
I. I NTRODUCTION
Fig. 1. (a) Proposed crawling microrobot in a tube. (b) Motion 1 of the front
and rear bodies. (c) Motion 2 of the middle bodies.
0018-9464 2014 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
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8500704
Fig. 4.
(1)
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through the bent tube, the front body of the microrobot should
be first steered by the magnetic torque (Te ) generated by the
rotating magnetic field. In addition, the propulsive force by the
crawling motion can help the steering motion of the front body.
The propulsive force pushes the front body along the bent tube,
and the normal force between the right leg of the front body
and the wall of the tube (Fx2 ) becomes larger than the normal
force between the left leg of the front body and the wall of
the tube (Fx1 ). Therefore, summation of the normal forces
and the magnetic torque makes the effective steering motion
of the front body. Since the propulsive (crawling) forces and
the rotating torque generate the steering motion together, this
mechanism is especially effective when the microrobot move
along sharply bent tubes. The steering angle of the front body
(s ) can be expressed as follows:
s = i + t
(4)
where i and t are the tilting angle of the middle body with
respect to the x-axis and the tilting angle of the front body
with respect to the x-axis, where x is the local coordinate of
x rotated by i . To calculate t , we assume a load condition
where the connecting wire generates deflection of the uniform
cross-sectional cantilever beam with a concentrated load and
torque at the free end. With this assumption, the vertical
deflection of the connecting wire (y) with respect to the x-axis
can be approximately modeled as the following second-order
differential equation with two boundary conditions [8]:
M
d2 y
=
2
dx
EI
y|x=0
d y
= 0,
=0
d x x=0
Fig. 5. (a) Experimental setup for the proposed crawling microrobot and
(b) MNS.
Fig. 6. (a) Main design variables of the crawling microrobot. (b) Components
of the crawling microrobot sequentially: flexible leg of the front and rear
bodies, flexible leg of the middle body, connecting wire, connecting
joint, rotating axle, and permanent magnet. (c) Prototyped crawling
microrobot.
TABLE I
M AIN D ESIGN VARIABLES OF THE P ROTOTYPED
C RAWLING M ICROROBOT
(5)
(6)
(7)
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