Soft Shell Micro Robots Ready To Navigate The Human Body
They are half a millimetre in size, have a star-shaped hydrogel shell and open when they are irradiated with laser light in the near-infrared range. The new micro-robots, developed in the laboratory of Professor Brad Nelson at ETH, will potentially aid the precision delivery of drugs.
When closed, they resemble plant seedpods; when rolled open, they look like starfish. Due to their shape, these new micro-robots could well be taken for living creatures. Stefano Fusco, a doctoral student at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS ), looked to nature for inspiration when he developed the movement mechanism that opens and closes the robot. The mechanism by which the Venus flytrap catches its insect prey served as the blueprint for the researcher’s ‘creatures’.
The small robot is not hard, but soft: it consists of two layers of hydrogel, a class of material made up of 90% water and 10% polymers. The arms of the starfish-like shell bend inwards on their own to form a capsule, which contains tiny magnetic beads coated with a cell-friendly alginate. The hydrogel bilayers are impregnated with a model drug and serve as a drug delivery platform. At the same time they protect the magnetic beads, which carry cells to the target zone.
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