Abstract
Microrobots, a subfield of active matter research, have made significant strides from fundamental science to biomedical applications. Field-driven microrobots have shown great promise in precise navigation and control within confined body spaces, a feature not achievable with current medical interventions like catheters. Moreover, their ability to physically deliver cargo (e.g., drugs) to specific tissue targets makes them an attractive platform to address systemic toxicity in current drug delivery systems. However, these promising applications come with certain challenges that researchers in the field are actively working to overcome. In this presentation, I will focus on the locomotion of microrobots in confined spaces, particularly surface magnetic microrollers that couple rotational motion to translation by breaking fluid symmetry near a solid boundary. I will present recent numerical simulations and experimental efforts aimed at understanding the hydrodynamics of microrollers navigating complex microterrains. Finally, I will highlight the open questions that remain regarding the underlying physics behind the locomotion of microrobots.
Biography
Amirreza Aghakhani is a Junior Professor at the University of Stuttgart, where he leads the Microrobotic Biomedical Systems group at the Institute for Biomaterials and Biomolecular Systems (Faculty 04). He is also a faculty member of the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems (IMPRS-IS). Before this, he was an Assistant Professor in Bioengineering at Newcastle University (UK) and a Postdoc Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart. He earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Koc University (Turkey) in 2018 and his B.Sc. in Mechanical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology (Iran) in 2012.