The sand-grain-sized robots work cooperatively, similar to ants Jeong Jae Wie et al.
Swarms of tiny robots guided by magnetic fields can coordinate to act like ants, from packing together to form a floating raft to lifting objects hundreds of times their weight. About the size of a grain of sand, the microrobots could someday do jobs larger bots cannot, such as unblocking blood vessels and delivering drugs to specific locations inside the human body.
at Hanyang University in South Korea and his colleagues made the tiny, cube-shaped robots using a mould and epoxy resin embedded with magnetic alloy. These small magnetic particles enable the microrobots to be 鈥減rogrammed鈥 to form various configurations after being exposed to strong magnetic fields from certain angles. The bots can then be controlled by external magnetic fields to perform spins or other motions. This approach allowed the team to 鈥渆fficiently and quickly produce hundreds to thousands of microrobots鈥, each with a magnetic profile designed for specific missions, says Wie.
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The researchers聽directed the microrobot swarms to cooperatively climb over obstacles five times higher than any single microrobot and form a floating raft on water. The bots also pushed through a clogged tube and transported a pill 2000 times their individual weight through liquid, demonstrating potential medical applications.
鈥淭hese magnetic microrobots hold great promise for minimally invasive drug delivery in small, enclosed and confined spaces,鈥 says at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, who was not involved in the research. But the microrobots cannot yet autonomously navigate complex and tight spaces such as arteries.
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Dong says there are safety challenges too, including needing to coat the 鈥減otentially toxic鈥 magnetic particles with human-friendly materials. Still, he says he is optimistic about the future medical uses of such microrobots. If safe, the bots 鈥渃an effectively navigate to targeted disease sites and deliver drugs locally鈥, making treatments more precise and effective.
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