microrobots tagged posts

Johns Hopkins University engineers have created robots the size of a pencil tip intended to travel through the body to deliver medicine to infections inside a beating heart.

The bots, designed to replace risky open-heart surgery and ineffective IV drug therapy to treat life-threatening heart infections, could also be used to treat other hard-to-reach diseases, including cancer, less invasively and more precisely.

“With just a little pinprick, you insert a microrobot and do a procedure without infection or blood loss...

Inspired by the growth of bones in the skeleton, researchers at the universities of Linköping in Sweden and Okayama in Japan have developed a combination of materials that can morph into various shapes before hardening. The material is initially soft, but later hardens through a bone development process that uses the same materials found in the skeleton.

When we are born, we have gaps in our skulls that are covered by pieces of soft connective tissue called fontanelles...

Schematic diagram of the molecular robot. Molecular actuators work inside the robot, and the shape of the artificial cell membrane, which are bodies, are changed. When a DNA signal is input, the “molecular clutch,” which transmits the force from the actuator, controls the shape-changing behavior. (B) Microscopy images of molecular robots. When the input DNA signal was “stop,” the clutch was turned “OFF,” and consequently, the shape-changing behavior was terminated (left side). The initiation of the shape-changing behavior when the DNA signal input was “start” was also confirmed (right side). Scale bar: 20 ?m. The white arrow indicates the molecular actuator part that transforms the membrane.
Credit: Yusuke Sato

Tohoku University and Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology researc...

Scientists at EPFL and ETHZ have developed a new method for building microrobots that could be used in the body to deliver drugs and perform other medical operations. Credit: Selman Sakar

The robots enter the human body, where they can deliver drugs at specific locations or perform precise operations like clearing clogged-up arteries. By replacing invasive, often complicated surgery, they could optimize medicine. EPFL and ETHZ scientists developed a simple and versatile method for building such bio-inspired robots and equipping them with advanced features. They also created a platform for testing several robot designs and studying different modes of locomotion. Their work produced complex reconfigurable microrobots that can be manufactured with high throughput...