controlliNg a magnEtic Micro-swimmer in cOnfined and complex environments – NEMO

NEMO aims to develop numerical methods to control a micro-robot swimmer in the arteries of the human body.
These robots could deliver drugs specifically to cancer cells before they form new tumors, thus avoiding metastasis and the traditional chemotherapy side effects.

NEMO will focus on micro-robots, called Magnetozoons, composed of a magnetic head and an elastic tail immersed into a laminar fluid possibly non-Newtonian. These robots imitate the propulsion of spermatozoa by propagating a wave along their tail.
Their movement is controlled by an external magnetic field that produces a torque on the head of the robot, producing a deformation of the tail. The tail then pushes the surrounding fluid and the robot moves forward.
The advantage of such a deformable swimmer is its aptness to carry out a large set of swimming strategies, which could be selected according to the geometry or the rheology of the biological media where the swimmer evolves (blood, eye retina, or other body tissues).

Although the control of a such micro-robots has mostly focused on simple unconfined environnement, the main challenge is today to design external magnetic fields that allow them to navigate efficiently in complex realistic environments.

NEMO aims to elaborate efficient controls, which will be designed by tuning the external magnetic field, through a combination of Bayesian optimization and accurate simulations of the swimmer's dynamics with Newtonian or non-Newtonian fluids. Then, the resulting magnetic fields will be validated experimentally in a range of confined environments.

In such an intricate situation, where the surrounding fluids is bounded laminar and possibly non-Newtonian, optimization of a strongly nonlinear, and possibly chaotic, high-dimensional dynamical system will lead to new paradigms.
The results of NEMO will be the subject of several publications in mathematical modeling, numerical analysis, optimization, control, physics and multidisciplinary journals.
The numerical developments will be provided as open-source softwares.
The experiments will contribute as a proof of concept validating the NEMO control approach.