Thrombosis is a major concern due to its high prevalence in death rates around the world and is expected to increase in the coming decades. To combat this issue, a design for a magnetic millimetre-scale robot is proposed. Its objective is to swim in blood vessels and engage with blood clots through the guidance and actuation of a rotating external magnet.
This design, called the Tethered Magnetic Micro-Robot (TMMR), features a guidewire and a flexible TPU wire as a tether to allow for a larger workspace. The tether is modelled following beam theory for large deformations, and validated for different tether lengths. It is shown that the TMMR is able to deflect enough to be guided in a trifurcation if the thrust force is increased to a value of 1.8 mN or if the flexural rigidity of the guidewire is multiplied by a factor of 0.12.