A conceptual advance that gives microrobots legs

Brooks, Allan M.; Strano, Michael S.

doi:10.1038/d41586-020-02421-2

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26 August 2020

A conceptual advance that gives microrobots legs

Tiny devices have been developed that can act as the legs of laser-controlled microrobots. The compatibility of these devices with microelectronics systems suggests a path to the mass manufacture of autonomous microrobots.

Allan M. Brooks ⁰ &
Michael S. Strano ¹

Allan M. Brooks
1. Allan M. Brooks is in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
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Michael S. Strano
1. Michael S. Strano is in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
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In 1959, Nobel laureate and nanotechnology visionary Richard Feynman suggested that it would be interesting to “swallow the surgeon” — that is, to make a tiny robot that could travel through blood vessels to carry out surgery where needed. This iconic imagining of the future underscored modern hopes for the field of micrometre-scale robotics: to deploy autonomous devices in environments that their macroscopic counterparts cannot reach. However, the construction of such robots presents several challenges, including the obvious difficulty of how to assemble a microscopic locomotive device. In a paper in Nature, Miskin et al.¹ report electrochemically driven devices that propel laser-controlled microrobots through a liquid, and which could be easily integrated with microelectronics components to construct fully autonomous microrobots.

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Nature 584, 530-531 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02421-2

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