The sand-grain-sized robots work cooperatively, much like ants
Jeong Jae Wie et al.
Swarms of tiny robots guided by magnetic fields can coordinate to behave like ants, from packing collectively to kind a floating raft to lifting objects lots of of instances their weight. Concerning the measurement of a grain of sand, the microrobots may sometime do jobs bigger bots can’t, comparable to unblocking blood vessels and delivering medicine to particular areas contained in the human physique.
Jeong Jae Wie at Hanyang College in South Korea and his colleagues made the tiny, cube-shaped robots utilizing a mould and epoxy resin embedded with magnetic alloy. These small magnetic particles allow the microrobots to be “programmed” to kind numerous configurations after being uncovered to sturdy magnetic fields from sure angles. The bots can then be managed by exterior magnetic fields to carry out spins or different motions. This method allowed the staff to “effectively and shortly produce lots of to hundreds of microrobots”, every with a magnetic profile designed for particular missions, says Wie.
The researchers directed the microrobot swarms to cooperatively climb over obstacles 5 instances larger than any single microrobot and kind a floating raft on water. The bots additionally pushed by a clogged tube and transported a capsule 2000 instances their particular person weight by liquid, demonstrating potential medical purposes.
“These magnetic microrobots maintain nice promise for minimally invasive drug supply in small, enclosed and confined areas,” says Xiaoguang Dong at Vanderbilt College in Tennessee, who was not concerned within the analysis. However the microrobots can’t but autonomously navigate complicated and tight areas comparable to arteries.
Dong says there are security challenges too, together with needing to coat the “doubtlessly poisonous” magnetic particles with human-friendly supplies. Nonetheless, he says he’s optimistic concerning the future medical makes use of of such microrobots. If protected, the bots “can successfully navigate to focused illness websites and ship medicine domestically”, making remedies extra exact and efficient.
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