Comparing swimming performances of flexible and helical magnetic swimmers

Flexible and helical magnetic microswimmers have been well reviewed in the literature because they could be exploited for envisaged applications such as targeted drug delivery, material removal, and micromanipulation. In this article, scaled-up versions of those robots are introduced to study in detail their maneuverability and dexterity while swimming. The robots were immersed in pure glycerol, thus, reproducing a low Reynolds scenario. The proposed robots were previously optimized, achieving their best performances. The experiments assess the performances of these two kinds of robots in terms of rapidity, and steering error following 3D trajectories in environments with high viscous variations.