A Novel Haptic Based Guidance Scheme for Swarm of Magnetic Nanoparticles Steering

A wide variety of haptic based teleoperation systems has been introduced for medical applications. Using force feedback in a haptic device is quite helpful for small and delicate medical interventions. This paper presents a haptic based virtual reality environment developed to steer magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) with a guidance strategy for moving the MNPs to the desired outlet. As a proof of concept, a low-cost 3D printed open-source haptic device is used. The experiments show that the haptic can efficiently steer MNPs in different velocities by magnetic forces. We have studied process ( magnetic field) and environmental (fluid velocity, number of particles) parameters with the VR-based haptic system to determine the most influential parameters. The fluid velocity showed to have the highest effect on steering performance. It has been shown that in the high fluid (10 mm/s velocities), only 50% of the particles are steered. We have developed a guidance scheme based on variable forbidden and safe zones to elevate the steering performance. By using the proposed guidance scheme, a 17.5% improvement in the performance has been observed. The promising results showed the potential of this approach in MNP based delivery.