Robots the size of grains of sand work cooperatively just like ants
Jeong J. Wie et al.
Swarms of tiny robots guided by magnetic fields can coordinate to perform tasks like ants, from packing together to form a floating raft, to lifting objects hundreds of times their own weight. About the size of a grain of sand, microrobots may someday do things that larger robots can’t, such as opening blood vessels and delivering drugs to specific locations inside the human body.
Jeong Jae Wi He and his colleagues at Hanyang University in South Korea created tiny, cube-shaped robots using a mold and epoxy resin embedded with magnetic alloy. These tiny magnetic particles enable microrobots to be “programmed” to form different configurations after being exposed to strong magnetic fields from certain angles. Bots can be controlled by external magnetic fields to spin or perform other motions. This approach allowed the team to “efficiently and quickly produce hundreds to thousands of microrobots,” says Wie, each of which had a magnetic profile designed for specific missions.
The researchers instructed microrobot swarms to cooperatively climb obstacles five times higher than a single microrobot and form a floating raft on water. The bots also pushed through a closed tube and delivered a pill 2000 times their individual weight through the liquid, demonstrating potential medical applications.
“These magnetic microrobots hold great promise for minimally invasive drug delivery in small, enclosed and confined spaces,” says xiaoguang dong at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who were not involved in the research. But microrobots still can’t autonomously navigate complex and tight spaces like arteries.
Dong says there are safety challenges, too, including the need to coat the “potentially toxic” magnetic particles with human-friendly materials. Still, he says he is optimistic about the future medical use of such microrobots. When safe, the bots can “effectively navigate to target disease sites and deliver drugs locally”, making treatment more precise and effective.
Subject:
(TagstoTranslate)Robots(T)Medical Technology(T)Robotics
