Robots the size of a grain of sand work together like ants
Jung Jae-wi et al.
Swarms of small robots guided by magnetic fields can coordinate and act like ants, even swarming to form floating rafts or lifting objects hundreds of times their weight. The microrobots, which are about the size of a grain of sand, could one day be able to perform tasks that larger robots cannot, such as unclogging blood vessels or delivering drugs to specific parts of the human body.
Jung Jaewi and his colleagues at South Korea's Hanyang University built the tiny, cubic-shaped robot using a mold and epoxy resin embedded with a magnetic alloy. These tiny magnetic particles allow the microrobot to be “programmed” to form different configurations after being exposed to a strong magnetic field from a specific angle. The bot is controlled by an external magnetic field and can perform rotations and other movements. This approach allowed the team to “efficiently and quickly manufacture hundreds to thousands of microrobots” with magnetic profiles designed for specific missions, Wee said.
The researchers instructed swarms of microrobots to work together to overcome obstacles five times higher than individual microrobots and form floating rafts on water. The bot also punched through a clogged tube and transported tablets weighing 2000 times their individual weight through a liquid, demonstrating potential medical applications.
“These magnetic microrobots hold great promise for minimally invasive drug delivery in confined, confined spaces,” he says. small guangdong from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee was not involved in the study. However, microrobots are not yet capable of autonomously navigating complex and narrow spaces such as arteries.
There are also safety challenges, Dong said, including the need to coat “potentially toxic” magnetic particles with human-friendly materials. Still, he says he's optimistic about future medical applications for such microrobots. When safe, bots can “effectively travel to targeted disease sites and deliver drugs locally,” making treatments more precise and effective.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
