Magnetic Soft Robots Enabling New Biomedical Applications

Recent advances in functional soft materials have facilitated the emergence of a new class of soft robots capable of tether-free actuation in response to external stimuli such as heat, light, solvent, and electric or magnetic fields. Among the various types of stimuli-responsive materials, magnetic soft materials have shown remarkable progress in their design and fabrication, leading to the development of magnetically controlled soft-bodied robots. Magnetic soft robots have unique advantages and potentials for biomedical applications as they utilize external magnetic fields as a safe and effective means of tether-free actuation in confined spaces inside the human body. In this presentation, we first summarize the recent progress in the field of magnetic soft materials and robots and highlight their demonstrated potentials in biomedical applications. Then, we present our latest development of a telerobotic neurointerventional platform based on a magnetically steerable, submillimeter-scale soft continuum robot and a teleoperated multi-DOF robot arm with an actuating magnet for steering purposes. We demonstrate our system’s capability to navigate narrow and winding pathways both in vitro with realistic neurovascular phantoms representing the human anatomy and in vivo in the porcine brachial artery with accentuated tortuosity for preclinical evaluation. We further demonstrate telerobotically assisted therapeutic procedures including coil embolization and clot retrieval thrombectomy for treating cerebral aneurysms and ischemic stroke, respectively. Facilitating safer and quicker access to hard-to-reach lesions in the complex neurovasculature, our developed system could advance endovascular neurosurgery through the application of robotic technologies and open the possibility of remote procedural services to address challenges in current stroke systems of care.