Dual-Arm Control for Enhanced Magnetic Manipulation

Magnetically actuated soft robots have recently been identified for application in medicine, due to their potential to perform minimally invasive exploration of human cavities. Magnetic solutions permit further miniaturization when compared to other actuation techniques, without loss in functionalities. Our long-term goal is to propose a novel actuation method for magnetically actuated soft robots, based on dual-arm collaborative magnetic manipulation. A fundamental step in this direction is to show that this actuation method is capable of controlling up to 8 coincident, independent Degrees of Freedom (DOFs). In present paper, we prove this concept by measuring the independent wrench components on a second pair of static permanent magnets, by means of a high resolution 6-axis load cell. The experiments show dominant activation of the desired DOFs, with mean cross-activation error of the undesired DOFs ranging from 2% to 10%.