Vision-based force sensing of a magnetic microrobot in a viscous flow

This paper has presented a new vision-based force-sensing framework that allows to characterize the forces applied on a magnetic microrobot in an endovascular-like environment. Especially, unlike common approaches used with optical microscopy where orthographic projection model are used, we consider in this paper the weak-perspective model. The proposed vision-based force characterization allows to retrieve the three dimensional (3D) translational velocities and accelerations of a microrobot viewed from a digital microscope. Hence, thanks to the dynamic model the external forces are estimated on-line. The framework was applied and validated for a magnetic microrobot navigating in a viscous flow. Experimental results in two different environments illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method.