#microrobotics

[plethoraworldatlas]

Two insect-like robots, a mini-bug and a water strider may be the smallest, lightest and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever known to be created. Such miniature robots could someday be used for work in areas such as artificial pollination, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, micro-fabrication or robotic-assisted surgery. Reporting on their work in the proceedings of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, the mini-bug weighs in at eight milligrams while the water strider weighs 55 milligrams. Both can move at about six millimeters a second.

...

Both can move at about six millimeters a second.

"That is fast compared to other micro-robots at this scale although it still lags behind their biological relatives," said Conor Trygstad, a PhD student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and lead author on the work.

An ant typically weighs up to five milligrams and can move at almost a meter per second.

The key to the tiny robots is their tiny actuators that make the robots move.

Trygstad used a new fabrication technique to miniaturize the actuator down to less than a milligram, the smallest ever known to have been made.

"The actuators are the smallest and fastest ever developed for micro-robotics," said Néstor O. Pérez-Arancibia, Flaherty Associate Professor in Engineering at WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering who led the project.

The actuator uses a material called a shape memory alloy that is able to change shapes when it's heated

[politikwatch]

Sie transportieren #Embryonen und bekämpfen #Krebszellen: Wie Nanoroboter heilen könnten

Die Illustration eines #Nanoroboters an einer Krebszelle

Noch ist ihr Einsatz im menschlichen Körper eine Zukunftsvision: ein #Mikroroboter bekämpft #Krebszellen

[mexicanistnet]

COLMENA, UNAM's lunar marvel, launches Jan 8 with microrobots breaking space size records. A Mexican space odyssey led by 250 young minds aims to conquer the Moon's challenges and revolutionize cosmic exploration.

[biglisbonnews]

A group of scientists made a working liquid metal robot https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.matt.2022.12.003/attachment/291fbfaf-1e1f-4729-a557-106bb4556a79/mmc3.mp4 From NewScientist: A miniature, shape-shifting robot can liquefy itself and reform, allowing it to complete tasks in hard-to-access places and even escape cages. It could eventually be used as a hands-free soldering machine or a tool for extracting swallowed toxic items. — Read the rest https://boingboing.net/2023/01/26/a-group-of-scientists-made-a-working-liquid-metal-robot.html

[cheaphousespending]

A mass production method for biodegradable microrobots that can disappear into the body after delivering cells and drugs

A mass production method for biodegradable microrobots that can disappear into the body after delivering cells and drugs

Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST, President Yang Kook) Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering collaborated with Professor Sung-Won Kim’s team at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, and Professor Bradley J. Nelson’s team at ETH Zurich to develop a technology that produces more than 100 microrobots per…

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last week

Hi, this is Erica. Let's start the week with some good news from around the world

📖 A new bill will provide millions of children in CA with free books thanks to Dolly Parton

A new bill signed into law will now provide millions of children in California with free books thanks to Dolly Parton.

The bill, SB 1183, was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom and will provide funding for Parton’s “Imagination Library” program, providing free books to children from birth to 5 years old.

Aiming to encourage preschool children to develop an early love of reading and learning, the bill received bipartisan support in both houses.

🦁 Pride of lions airlifted from Ukraine to Colorado in “biggest-ever warzone rescue of lions”

A pride of lions that were living at the Bio Park Zoo in Odessa, a southern city in Ukraine that has been impacted by the Russian-Ukraine war, has been airlifted to the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Colorado, according to a news release.

“The big cats were urgently relocated when the war first broke by a convoy that journeyed over 600 miles across Ukraine and Moldova, arriving in Targu Mures, Romania, on May 24, 2022. The Targu Mures Zoo provided a temporary home for the animals for several months so that an emergency travel permit could be approved for the eleven lions to board an international rescue flight,” the release said.

🐶 Hundreds of Dogs Saved From Nevada Breeding Farm in Huge Police Operation

Authorities have seized around 300 dogs from a property in Nevada in what officials have described as a “large-scale” animal cruelty situation. Detectives from Nye County Sheriff’s Office (NCSO) obtained a search warrant for a property in Amargosa Valley following an investigation and visited the location on Tuesday.

There, officials arrested a couple — Oskana Higgins and Vasili Platunov — on felony animal abuse and neglect charges, the NCSO said.

✍️ This 33-year-old made more than 1,000 Wikipedia bios for unknown women scientists

Jessica Wade began writing Wikipedia biographies about women and minority scientists who never got their due — from employers, from other scientists, from the public. Wade has written more than 1,600 Wikipedia entries for long-ignored women scientists, and she has firm beliefs on ideas on how to support girls interested in the field.

She won awards and medals and was cited by Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia.

🐦 When you next hear cheerful twittering of birds, you should stop and listen: new study suggests that listening to birdsong reduces anxiety and paranoia

Birdsongs alleviate anxiety and paranoia in healthy participants.

Fun fact: Did you know that they play bird songs at Tokyo subway stations to stop people getting stressed out on their morning commute?

☄️ Nasa’s Dart spacecraft ‘changed path of asteroid’

Scientists have now confirmed the orbit of a 160m-wide (520ft) space rock known as Dimorphos was altered when the Dart probe struck it head on last month. Researchers came to the conclusion after making measurements using a range of space and Earth-based telescopes.

The mission was conceived to test a potential strategy to defend the Earth against threatening objects.

🤖 Tiny Robots Have Successfully Cleared Pneumonia From The Lungs of Mice

Scientists have been able to direct a swarm of microscopic swimming robots to clear out pneumonia microbes in the lungs of mice, raising hopes that a similar treatment could be developed to treat deadly bacterial pneumonia in humans. The technology is still at a proof-of-concept stage, but the early signs are very promising.

“Based on this mouse data, we see that the microrobots could potentially improve antibiotic penetration to kill bacterial pathogens and save more patients’ lives,” says Victor Nizet, a physician and professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego.

That’s it for this week. This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Have a great week ahead.

Subscribe to the newsletter

[darkmaga-retard]

Ana Maria Mihalcea, MD, PhD

Aug 16, 2024

Video: severe rouleaux formation and many micellar microbots

In this post, I want to share some more video footage of microrobots in Covid 19 unvaccinated blood. I am sharing my concerns with the world, because I find these in everyone now, especially when they come to my clinic for detoxification for the first time. It is my hope that the video images will break through the walls of denial. I am very concerned about humanity and the future of our species. These nano and microrobots clearly are instrumental in creating rouleaux formation ( clumping of the blood that does not allow proper oxygen delivery) - as well as creation of mesogen DNA microchips, which I have shown in other posts. Please share these videos, maybe they will reach someone, wake them up. I show you simply what I see everyday in my clinic, in everyone that comes to me. All of these examples are COVID UNVACCINATED, meaning they either got contaminated via shedding, geoengineering, food or water supply. I have hundreds of videos, but can only fit so many on one substack.

[stevebattle]

Ants: Anita, Sandra, Kisha, Tracie, Niqi, and Hope (1995) by James McLurkin, MIT AI Lab, Cambridge, MA. There were six robot ants, all with womens’ names since all worker ants are female. We see McLurkin with his ‘Ant Farm’, and before and after images of the ants foraging for ‘food’, then responding to signals from the first ant to find it. “The Ants are programmed with a subset of Brooks' Subsumption Architecture implemented in 6811 assembly language. A program for the Ants would consist of a group of behaviors, arranged in a hierarchy. … A behavior is a small piece of code that acts like a finite state machine. … This is an effective method of providing the robot with a response for every possible sensory input, without having to explicitly program for every condition. Summing the responses of many behaviors is a much easier task that looking at all of the sensory inputs and then trying to decide what to do. As a result, the robots can exhibit surprisingly complex actions with a very small amount of software. … When a robot finds food, she stops and transmits I-found-food through her IR beacon emitter. Other members in the vicinity that detect this signal head towards her, transmitting I-see-a-robot-with-food from their beacon emitters. Any robot that detects this secondary signal heads towards it until they receive the primary signal, then the head towards the first robot. In this manner, many robots can be vectored towards a large food source quickly.” – The Ants: A Community of Microrobots by James McLurkin.

[shadowspirez]

im sure youll be delighted to know

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/08/1084696/medical-microrobots-are-still-on-their-way/

JIZZ DELIVERY ROBOTS?!?!?

[genustoys]

Zhero Microrobot and Alien Visitor handheld LCD generic games

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Manufacturing microscopic octopuses with a 3D printer

Although just cute little creatures at first glance, the microscopic geckos and octopuses fabricated by 3D laser printing in the molecular engineering labs at Heidelberg University could open up new opportunities in fields such as microrobotics or biomedicine.

The printed microstructures are made from novel materials—known as smart polymers—whose size and mechanical properties can be tuned on demand and with high precision. These "life-like" 3D microstructures were developed in the framework of the "3D Matter Made to Order" (3DMM2O) Cluster of Excellence, a collaboration between Ruperto Carola and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT).

"Manufacturing programmable materials whose mechanical properties can be adapted on demand is highly desired for many applications," states Junior Professor Dr. Eva Blasco, group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and the Institute for Molecular Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials of Heidelberg University.

Read more.

[2sundowner69]

Medical microrobots that can travel inside your body are (still) on their way

[koney-toylines]

Random microrobots pics

[bpod-bpod]

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Communication Matters

From flocking birds to swimming bacteria, when life moves together it relies on communication. Amoebae are single-cell organisms that use chemicals to communicate when swarming – here researchers mimic their behaviour using a mathematical model to simulate communicating 'agents' (top left). The virtual agents send and receive signals, creating mock chemical patterns (bottom left) which guide a ‘collective movement’ The exchange of signals helps the agents organise themselves, and the direction of their movement (highlighted in rainbow colours) gradually combine into one swirl. The team also develop a larger scale model of a 'field' of particles (right), watching how similar 'droplets' join together into 'streams'. Predicting how order emerges from disorder in different forms of living active matter may help researchers design microrobots set to tasks inside the body, or to use their insights to disrupt harmful swarms of pathogens.

Written by John Ankers

Video from work by Alexander Ziepke and colleagues

Arnold Sommerfeld Center for Theoretical Physics and Center for NanoSciences, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, München, Germany

Video originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Nature Communications, November 2022

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

[jcmarchi]

Kirigami Principles Drive Breakthrough in Microrobot Design

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/kirigami-principles-drive-breakthrough-in-microrobot-design/

Kirigami Principles Drive Breakthrough in Microrobot Design

Recent years have witnessed significant strides in the field of microscale robotics, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible at the miniature level. These advancements have paved the way for potential breakthroughs in areas ranging from medical applications to environmental monitoring. In this landscape of innovation, researchers at Cornell University have made a noteworthy contribution, developing microscale robots that can transform their shape on command.

The team, led by Professor Itai Cohen from Cornell’s Department of Physics, has created robots less than one millimeter in size that can change from a flat, two-dimensional form into various three-dimensional shapes. This development, detailed in a paper published in Nature Materials, represents a significant leap forward in the capabilities of microscale robotic systems.

Application of Kirigami Techniques in Robotic Engineering

At the heart of this breakthrough lies an innovative application of kirigami principles to robotic design. Kirigami, a variation of origami that involves cutting as well as folding paper, has inspired engineers to create structures that can change shape in precise and predictable ways.

In the context of these microscale robots, kirigami techniques allow for the incorporation of strategic cuts and folds in the material. This design approach enables the robots to transform from a flat state into complex three-dimensional configurations, granting them unprecedented versatility at the microscale level.

The researchers have dubbed their creation a “metasheet robot.” The term “meta” here refers to metamaterials – engineered materials with properties not found in naturally occurring substances. In this case, the metasheet is composed of numerous building blocks working in concert to produce unique mechanical behaviors.

This metasheet design allows the robot to change its coverage area and expand or contract locally by up to 40%. The ability to adopt various shapes potentially enables these robots to interact with their environment in ways previously unattainable at this scale.

Technical Specifications and Functionality

The microscale robot is constructed as a hexagonal tiling composed of approximately 100 silicon dioxide panels. These panels are interconnected by more than 200 actuating hinges, each measuring about 10 nanometers in thickness. This intricate arrangement of panels and hinges forms the basis of the robot’s shape-shifting capabilities.

The transformation and movement of these robots are achieved through electrochemical activation. When an electrical current is applied via external wires, it triggers the actuating hinges to form mountain and valley folds. This actuation causes the panels to splay open and rotate, enabling the robot to change its shape.

By selectively activating different hinges, the robot can adopt various configurations. This allows it to potentially wrap around objects or unfold back into a flat sheet. The ability to crawl and change shape in response to electrical stimuli demonstrates a level of control and versatility that sets these robots apart from previous microscale designs.

Potential Applications and Implications

The development of these shape-shifting microscale robots opens up a multitude of potential applications across various fields. In the realm of medicine, these robots could revolutionize minimally invasive procedures. Their ability to change shape and navigate through complex bodily structures could make them invaluable for targeted drug delivery or microsurgery.

In the field of environmental science, these robots could be deployed for microscale monitoring of ecosystems or pollutants. Their small size and adaptability would allow them to access and interact with environments that are currently difficult to study.

Furthermore, in materials science and manufacturing, these robots could serve as building blocks for reconfigurable micromachines. This could lead to the development of adaptive materials that can change their properties on demand, opening up new possibilities in fields such as aerospace engineering or smart textiles.

Future Research Directions

The Cornell team is already looking ahead to the next phase of this technology. One exciting avenue of research is the development of what they term “elastronic” materials. These would combine flexible mechanical structures with electronic controllers, creating ultra-responsive materials with properties that surpass anything found in nature.

Professor Cohen envisions materials that can respond to stimuli in programmed ways. For instance, when subjected to force, these materials could “run” away or push back with greater force than they experienced. This concept of intelligent matter governed by principles that transcend natural limitations could lead to transformative applications across multiple industries.

Another area of future research involves enhancing the robots’ ability to harvest energy from their environment. By incorporating light-sensitive electronics into each building block, researchers aim to create robots that can operate autonomously for extended periods.

Challenges and Considerations

Despite the exciting potential of these microscale robots, several challenges remain. One primary concern is scaling up the production of these devices while maintaining precision and reliability. The intricate nature of the robots’ construction presents significant manufacturing hurdles that need to be overcome for widespread application.

Additionally, controlling these robots in real-world environments poses substantial challenges. While the current research demonstrates control via external wires, developing systems for wireless control and power supply at this scale remains a significant hurdle.

Ethical considerations also come into play, particularly when considering potential biomedical applications. The use of microscale robots inside the human body raises important questions about safety, long-term effects, and patient consent that will need to be carefully addressed.

The Bottom Line

The development of shape-shifting microscale robots by Cornell University researchers marks a significant milestone in robotics and materials science. By ingeniously applying kirigami principles to create metasheet structures, this breakthrough opens up a wide array of potential applications, from revolutionary medical procedures to advanced environmental monitoring. 

While challenges in manufacturing, control, and ethical considerations remain, this research lays the groundwork for future innovations such as “elastronic” materials. As this technology continues to evolve, it has the potential to reshape multiple industries and our broader technological landscape, demonstrating once again how advancements at the microscale can lead to outsized impacts on science and society.