Fully integrated wearable control system for micro/nanorobot navigation

Abstract Micro/nanorobots have exhibited excellent application potential in the biomedical field, such as drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery, and bio-sensing. Furthermore, in order to achieve practical application, it is essential for swimming micro/nanorobots to navigate towards specific targets or adjust their speed and morphology in complete environments. The navigation of swimming micro/nanorobots with temporal and spatial precision is critical for fulfilling the demand of applications. Here, we introduced a fully integrated wearable control system for micro/nanorobots navigation and manipulation, which is composed of a multifunctional sensor array, an artificial intelligence (AI) planner, and a magnetic field generator. The sensor array could perceive real-time changes in gestures, wrist rotation, and acoustic signals. AI planner based on machine learning offers adaptive path planning in response to dynamically changing signals to generate magnetic fields for the on-demand manipulation of micro/nanorobots. Such a novel, feasible control strategy was validated in the biological experiment in which cancer cells were targeted and killed by photothermal therapy using micro/nanorobots and integrated control platform. This wearable control system could play a crucial role in future intelligent medical applications and could be easily reconfigured toward other medical robots’ control.