Reinforcement Learning-Based Energy-Efficient and Obstacle-Free Path Planning for Magnetic Microrobots in Dynamic Environments

Abstract

Online path planning for magnetic microrobots actuated by electromagnetic system in dynamic flow field presents significant challenges due to time-varying fluid dynamics, energy constraints, and collision risks. Traditional path planning approaches, which often rely on static flow assumptions or simplified geometric models, struggle to balance energy efficiency, path continuity, and adaptability in real-world scenarios. This paper introduces an end-to-end path planner for energy-efficient and collision-free navigation of magnetic helical microrobots, integrating flow field feature extraction and reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our method employs a transformer encoder to capture contextual correlations of flow field and uses a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework to optimize energy consumption while ensuring dynamic obstacle avoidance. Simulations and experiments in dynamic flow environments validate our approach, demonstrating 14.7% lower energy consumption and robust collision avoidance in several different test scenarios.