The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Multi-scale Medical Robotics Center Limited

Lidong Yang

Li Zhang

Moqiu Zhang

Kai Fung Chan

Xingzhou Du

Yabin Zhang

Chi-Ian Vong

Lin Zhang

Edwin Yu

Ka Kei William Wu

A magnetic manipulation system and method for moving and navigating a magnetic device in a body are provided. The system includes a robotic parallel mechanism having at least three electromagnets and at least three electromagnetic coils coupled to the at least three electromagnets, respectively. The electromagnetic coils are actuated to keep the electromagnets in static conditions or move the electromagnets along a desired trajectory, a current control unit supplying currents to the electromagnetic coils which have soft iron cores. The currents supplied by the control unit are configured to generate dynamic magnetic field in the soft iron core's linear region. The current control unit and the robotic parallel mechanism are configured to generate desired dynamic magnetic fields in desired positions within a workspace to control a magnetic device, and a three-dimensional position sensor is configured for performing a close loop control of the robotic parallel mechanism.

Parallel mobile coil mechanism for magnetic manipulation in large workspace

Magnetic field has been considered as a safe and promising method for remote control of medical robots in body. Systems that implement electromagnetic coils can provide wide control bandwidth and on-off capability. However, scaling-up the working space of such systems for clinical use and increasing energy efficiency to reduce heat generation have always been a challenging task. The design, modeling and control methods for a magnetic actuation system with multiple mobile electromagnetic coils with decoupled movements are introduced. The high flexibility of such configuration and the proposed real-time control strategy enables the system to enlarge the working space by tracking the locomotion of the robot, deal with the irregularly shaped obstructions inside the working area, work with medical imaging systems for localization of the medical robots, generate various kind of magnetic field for actuation and conduct real-time optimization on coils' positions to enhance energy efficiency.

Mobile-electromagnetic coil-based magnetic actuation systems

Disclosed are methods and apparatus for controlling electromagnetic field generation system to generate dynamic magnetic fields. The method can comprise: establishing a dynamic model that describes open-loop dynamics of the electromagnetic field generation system and has an unified state-space form with time delay; configuring a controller based on the dynamic model; applying, by the controller, a control signal to the electromagnetic field generation system; detecting one or more feedback signals from the electromagnetic field generation system; and updating, by the controller, the control signal for controlling the electromagnetic field generation system, according to a reference signal corresponding to a desired dynamic magnetic field, one or more compensated feedback signals, and system states. To address time delay and modeling error and to estimate system states, a Kalman filter and a Smith predictor based compensator can be incorporated.

Methods and systems for controlling electromagnetic field generators

Disclosed are materials, devices, methods and systems for the detection of target molecules in test samples using microrobots. The target molecules may be bacterial toxins. The microrobots may include biohybrid materials such as porous spore core, a middle layer coated on the spore core for the actuation and steering in a fluid and further conjugation with a functional probe, and a sensing probe anchored onto middle layer for attaching to the targeted molecules in a fluid to respond to fluorescent tracking. A system for detecting bacterial toxin, is disclosed and comprises an intelligent motion control system based on automated fluorescent recognition and detection methods, which can propel and guide the microrobots to realize the automated motion in a pre-designed path and perform the real-time monitoring when integrating with an inverted fluorescent microscope or a fluorescent emission multi-reader.

Spore-based bio-hybrid microrobots and the automated detection system for bacterial toxins

Growing community of inventors

Hong Kong, China

Lidong Yang