DYNAMIC MODELING AND TRACKING CONTROL OF A SWIMMING MICROROBOT PROPELLED BY TWO PROKARYOTIC FLAGELLA

Abstract

Swimming microrobots are miniature machines which can be designed and fabricatedusing microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. They can play a key role in manybiomedical applications, such as controlled drug delivery, microsurgery, and diseases monitoring.Many researches have been carried out on micro swimming methodologies. Also, differentpropulsion mechanisms have been introduced for 1-DOF microswimmers. The objective of thiswork is to study a flagellar microswimmer with controlled maneuvers. The propulsion mechanismused in our design contains two prokaryotic flagella, rotating into the fluid media, leading tomicrorobot movement. In this study, we have tried to focus on dynamic modeling of the motionproposed for the swimming microrobot. Then, an appropriate control law was developed in orderto control the microrobot maneuvers. The resistive-force theory was used in order to determine thehydrodynamic force created by the rotary motion of each flagellum into the fluid media. Feedbacklinearization method was used to control the motion of microrobot for tracking performance. Theresults obtained revealed that microrobot can be controlled in such a way that the desiredmaneuver can be performed by applying the designed controller.