The sand-grain-sized robots work cooperatively, just 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 a whole lot of occasions their weight. Concerning the dimension of a grain of sand, the microrobots may sometime do jobs bigger bots can’t, equivalent to unblocking blood vessels and delivering medicine to particular places 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 robust 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 rapidly produce a whole lot to 1000’s 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 occasions larger than any single microrobot and kind a floating raft on water. The bots additionally pushed via a clogged tube and transported a tablet 2000 occasions their particular person weight via liquid, demonstrating potential medical functions.
“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 advanced and tight areas equivalent to arteries.
Dong says there are security challenges too, together with needing to coat the “probably 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 therapies extra exact and efficient.
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