ETD

• biofluids
• propulsion
• Reynolds number
• two-link microrobot

State-of-the-art miniaturisation technologies are now boosting the development of endogenous medical tools to micro-scales. Amongst these ongoing research efforts, endowing micro-tools with effective locomotion would represent a major breakthrough, specially swimming microrobots through the bloodstream since they would have access to any part of the body. However many challenges have to be overcome to enable the swimming microrobot concept, for example the full characterisation of the fluidic medium and its dynamic behaviour at micro-scale is needed.

The aim of this investigation is to formulate an experimental protocol for the best performance of a swimming microrobot. The first part of this thesis presents a brief review of existing swimming microrobots concepts and their characteristics of motion. Second section presents computer simulations for kinetic and kinematic estimations for the microrobot configuration at issue. The final section presents the simulation results showing that it is plausible to obtain net displacement from a simple reciprocating microrobot with one degree of freedom in non-newtonian fluids at low Reynolds number.