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Soft microbots programmed by nanomagnets

Arrays of nanoscale magnets have been constructed to form the magnetized panels of microscopic robots — thus allowing magnetic fields to be used to control the robots’ shape and movement.
  1. Xuanhe Zhao

    1. Xuanhe Zhao is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

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  2. Yoonho Kim

    1. Yoonho Kim is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.

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In science-fiction films, robots are often depicted as human-sized or larger machines made of rigid materials. However, robots made of soft materials or with flexible structures, and that can be much smaller than the human body, have attracted great interest in the past few years because they have the potential to interact with humans more safely than can rigid machines. Indeed, sufficiently small soft robots could even be used for biomedical applications in the human body. Various options are available to power these robots, but magnetic fields offer a safe and effective means of wireless operation in confined spaces in the body. Writing in Nature, Cui et al.1 report a key step towards the fabrication of micrometre-scale robots that, in a programmable manner, can quickly morph into different shapes in applied magnetic fields.

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Nature 575, 58-59 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-03363-0

References

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