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Soft robotics: Do the locomotion with me

Nature Reviews Materials volume 3, Article number: 18007 (2018) Cite this article

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Artificial, soft robots can mimic soft biological systems and, as a result, hold great promise for applications at the interface of machine and human. For example, they can be used to provide non-invasive access to human tissue in surgery or for drug delivery. Now, writing in Nature, Metin Sitti and colleagues report a magnetically driven, elastic, micrometre-sized robot that can navigate through tissue using different types of motion, as well as transport and deliver cargo to a specific location.

The robot designed by Sitti and co-workers is made of a soft polymer with embedded magnetic microparticles. It is rectangular in shape, untethered and operated through external actuation by a magnetic field. The strength and direction of the magnetic field determines the body shape and locomotion type of the robot owing to a magnetic torque caused by the interaction between the field and the magnetization profile of the robot's body. For example, a weak, rotating magnetic field creates a travelling wave along the body, whereas a magnetic field with a high magnitude causes the deformation of the robot into a ‘C’ or ‘V’ shape, similar to the movement of caterpillars. If the direction of the field is changed, the robot starts rotating. These changes in shape enable the robot to walk, jump, roll, climb, swim and crawl through obstacles, simply by deforming its body. Moreover, the hydrophobic surface allows the robot to skim across the water surface.

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References

  1. Hu, W. et al. Small-scale soft-bodied robot with multimodal locomotion. Naturehttps://doi.org/10.1038/nature25443 (2018)

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Authors
  1. Christine-Maria Horejs
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Horejs, CM. Soft robotics: Do the locomotion with me. Nat Rev Mater 3, 18007 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/natrevmats.2018.7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/natrevmats.2018.7

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