Macro-micromanipulation platform for inner ear drug delivery

This paper describes the pulling and steering of magnetic therapeutic microparticles for drug delivery based on a macro-micromanipulator system. The macromanipulation system is composed of a 6 Degree Of Freedom (6 DOF) serial manipulator while a linear permanent-based actuator (1 DOF) is equipped at the end-effector as a micropart to precisely steer and pull magnetic microparticles. Using the classical mathematical tools of robotics, we developed the global kinematic model of the robot-device assembly, thus defining a reference trajectory to propel the microparticles. A novel actuator-based permanent magnet has been designed and realized as a robot micro end-effector to control the trajectory of a microparticle along a millimeter-sized workspace. Simulations and experiments were conducted to show the ability of the macro-micromanipulator system to steer particles on a viscous fluid simulating a biological media.