For drug delivery in cancer therapy, various stimuli-responsive hydrogel-based micro-devices have been studied with great interest. Here, we present a new concept for a hybrid actuated soft microrobot targeted drug delivery. The proposed soft microrobot consists of a hydrogel bilayer structure of 2-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (PHEMA) and poly (ethylene glycol) acrylate (PEGDA) with iron (II, III) oxide particles (Fe ₃ O ₄ ). The PHEMA layer as a pH-responsive gel is used for a trapping and unfolding motion of the soft microrobot in pH-varying solution, and the PEGDA-with-Fe ₃ O ₄ layer is employed for the locomotion of the soft microrobot in the magnetic field. The bilayer soft microrobot was fabricated by a conventional photolithography procedure and its characteristics were analyzed and presented. To evaluate the trapping performance and the motility of the soft microrobot, test solutions with different pH values and an electromagnetic actuation (EMA) system were used. First, the soft microrobot showed its full trapping motion at about pH 9.58 and its unfolding motion at about pH 2.6. Second, the soft microrobot showed a moving velocity of about 600 μ m s ⁻¹ through the generated magnetic field of the EMA system. Finally, we fabricated the real anti-cancer drug microbeads (PCL-DTX) and executed the cytotoxicity test using the mammary carcinoma cells (4T1). The viability of the 4T1 cells treated with the proposed microrobot and the PCL-DTX microbeads decreased to 70.25 ± 1.52%. The result demonstrated that the soft microrobot can be moved to a target position by the EMA system and can release a small amount of beads by the pH variation and the robot exhibited no toxicity to the cells. In the future, we expect that the proposed soft microrobot can be applied to a new tumor-therapeutic tool that can move to a target tumor and release anti-tumor drugs.

As one of the most significant research topics in robotics, microrobots hold great promise in biomedicine for applications such as targeted diagnosis, targeted drug delivery, and minimally invasive treatment. This paper proposes an enhanced YOLOv5 (You Only Look Once version 5) microrobot detection and tracking system (MDTS), incorporating a visual tracking algorithm to elevate the precision of small-target detection and tracking. The improved YOLOv5 network structure is used to take magnetic bodies with sizes of 3 mm and 1 mm and a magnetic microrobot with a length of 2 mm as the pretraining targets, and the training weight model is used to obtain the position information and motion information of the microrobot in real time. The experimental results show that the accuracy of the improved network model for magnetic bodies with a size of 3 mm is 95.81%, representing an increase of 2.1%; for magnetic bodies with a size of 1 mm, the accuracy is 91.03%, representing an increase of 1.33%; and for microrobots with a length of 2 mm, the accuracy is 91.7%, representing an increase of 1.5%. The combination of the improved YOLOv5 network model and the vision algorithm can effectively realize the real-time detection and tracking of magnetically controlled microrobots. Finally, 2D and 3D detection and tracking experiments relating to microrobots are designed to verify the robustness and effectiveness of the system, which provides strong support for the operation and control of microrobots in an in vivo environment.