Microbotics

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For other uses, see MicroBot.

Jasmine minirobots each smaller than 3 cm (1 in) in width

Microbotics (or microrobotics) is the field of miniature robotics, in particular mobile
robots with characteristic dimensions less than 1 mm. The term can also be used for
robots capable of handling micrometer size components.

History
Microbots were born thanks to the appearance of the microcontroller in the last
decade of the 20th century, and the appearance of miniature mechanical systems
on silicon (MEMS), although many microbots do not use silicon for mechanical
components other than sensors. The earliest research and conceptual design of
such small robots was conducted in the early 1970s in (then) classified research for
U.S. intelligence agencies. Applications envisioned at that time included prisoner of
war rescue assistance and electronic intercept missions. The underlying
miniaturization support technologies were not fully developed at that time, so that
progress in prototype development was not immediately forthcoming from this early
set of calculations and concept design.As of 2008, the smallest microrobots use a
Scratch Drive Actuator.

The development of wireless connections, especially Wi-Fi (i.e. in domotic networks)

has greatly increased the communication capacity of microbots, and consequently
their ability to coordinate with other microbots to carry out more complex tasks.
Indeed, much recent research has focused on microbot communication, including a
1,024 robot swarm at Harvard University that assembles itself into various shapes
and manufacturing microbots at SRI International for DARPA's "MicroFactory for
Macro Products" program that can build lightweight, high-strength structures.

Design considerations

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While the 'micro' prefix has been used subjectively to mean small, standardizing on
length scales avoids confusion. Thus a nanorobot would have characteristic

dimensions at or below 1 micrometer, or manipulate components on the 1 to 1000

nm size range. A microrobot would have characteristic dimensions less than 1
millimeter, a millirobot would have dimensions less than a cm, a minirobot would
have dimensions less than 10 cm (4 in), and a small robot would have dimensions
less than 100 cm (39 in).

Due to their small size, microbots are potentially very cheap, and could be used in
large numbers (swarm robotics) to explore environments which are too small or too
dangerous for people or larger robots. It is expected that microbots will be useful in
applications such as looking for survivors in collapsed buildings after an earthquake,
or crawling through the digestive tract. What microbots lack in brawn or
computational power, they can make up for by using large numbers, as in swarms
of microbots.

The way microrobots move around is a function of their purpose and necessary size.
At submicron sizes, the physical world demands rather bizarre ways of getting
around. The Reynolds number for airborne robots is close to unity; the viscous
forces dominate the inertial forces, so flying could use the viscosity of air, rather
than Bernoulli's principle of lift. Robots moving through fluids may require rotating
flagella like the motile form of E. coli. Hopping is stealthy and energy-efficient; it
allows the robot to negotiate the surfaces of a variety of terrains. Pioneering
calculations (Solem 1994) examined possible behaviours based on physical realities.

One of the major challenges in developing a microrobot is to achieve motion using a

very limited power supply. The microrobots can use a small lightweight battery
source like a coin cell or can scavenge power from the surrounding environment in
the form of vibration or light energy. Microrobots are also now using biological
motors as power sources, such as flagellated Serratia marcescens, to draw chemical
power from the surrounding fluid to actuate the robotic device. These biorobots can
be directly controlled by stimuli such as chemotaxis or galvanotaxis with several
control schemes available. A popular alternative to an on-board battery is to power
the robots using externally induced power. Examples include the use of
electromagnetic fields, ultrasound and light to activate and control micro robots.

Microbots can clean up polluted water

microbots
Illustration of a self-propelled graphene oxide-based microbot for removing lead
from wastewater. Credit: Vilela, et al. 2016 American Chemical Society
(Phys.org)A new study shows that a swarm of hundreds of thousands of tiny
microbots, each smaller than the width of a human hair, can be deployed into
industrial wastewater to absorb and remove toxic heavy metals. The researchers
found that the microbots can remove 95% of the lead in polluted water in one hour,
and can be reused multiple times, potentially offering a more effective and
economical way to remove heavy metals than previous methods.

The researchers, Diana Vilela, et al., have published a paper on the lead-adsorbing
microbots in a recent issue of Nano Letters.
"This work is a step toward the development of smart remediation system where we
can target and remove traces of pollutant without producing an additional
contamination," coauthor Samuel Snchez, at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent
Systems in Stuttgart, Germany; the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in
Barcelona; and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in
Barcelona, told Phys.org.
Heavy metal pollution in water is a common problem stemming from industrial
activities, including the manufacturing of batteries and electronics, as well as
mining and electroplating. These activities produce metals such as lead, arsenic,
mercury, cadmium, and chromium, all of which pose a safety hazard to living
organisms and the environment.
In the new study, the researchers focused specifically on removing lead from
wastewater by designing tube-shaped microbots with three functional layers. The
outer layer of graphene oxide adsorbs the lead from the water. The middle layer,
nickel, makes the microbots ferromagnetic so that their direction of motion can be
controlled by an external magnetic field. The inner layer, platinum, gives the
microbots the ability to self-propel themselves through water. When hydrogen
peroxide is added to the wastewater, the platinum decomposes the hydrogen
peroxide into water and oxygen microbubbles, and ejecting the microbubbles from
the back of the microbot propels it forward.

Magnetic guidance of a microbot. Credit: Vilela, et al. 2016 American Chemical

Society
When the microbots are finished adsorbing the lead, a magnetic field can be used to
collect them all from the water. Then the microbots are treated in an acidic solution
to remove the lead ions, which can later be recovered and reused. The microbots
can also be reused for further lead clean-up.

"This is a new application of smart nanodevices for environmental applications,"

Snchez said. "The use of self-powered nanomachines that can capture heavy
metals from contaminated solutions, transport them to desired places and even
release them for 'closing the loop'that is a proof-of-concept towards industrial
applications."
In the future, the microbots could even be controlled by an automated system that
magnetically guides the swarm to accomplish various tasks.
"We plan to extend the microbots to other contaminants, and also importantly
reduce the fabrication costs and mass-produce them," Snchez said.
The combination of self-propelled robots with functional layers also opens the doors
for similar designs that could have applications in areas including drug delivery and
sensing.

Researchers are using a technology likened to "mini force fields" to independently

control individual microrobots operating within groups, an advance aimed at using
the tiny machines in areas including manufacturing and medicine.
Until now it was only possible to control groups of microbots to move generally in
unison, said David Cappelleri, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at
Purdue University.
"The reason we want independent movement of each robot is so they can do
cooperative manipulation tasks," he said. "Think of ants. They can independently
move, yet all work together to perform tasks such as lifting and moving things. We
want to be able to control them individually so we can have some robots here doing
one thing, and some robots there doing something else at the same time."
Findings are detailed in a research paper appearing this month in the journal
Micromachines. Postdoctoral research associates Sagar Chowdhury and Wuming
Jing, and Cappelleri authored the paper.
The team developed a system for controlling the robots with individual magnetic
fields from an array of tiny planar coils.
"The robots are too small to put batteries on them, so they can't have onboard
power," Cappelleri said. "You need to use an external way to power them. We use
magnetic fields to generate forces on the robots. It's like using mini force fields."
The research is revealing precisely how to control the robots individually.
"We need to know, if a robot is here and it needs to go there, how much force needs
to be applied to the robot to get it from point A to point B?" Cappelleri said. "Once
you figure out what that force has to be, then we say, what kind of magnetic field
strength do we need to generate that force?"
The microbots are magnetic disks that slide across a surface (shown in this video
https://youtu.be/n_jGoi0a6Po). While the versions studied are around 2 millimeters
in diameter about twice the size of a pinhead - researches aim to create microbots
that are around 250 microns in diameter, or roughly the size of a dust mite.
In previously developed systems the microbots were controlled using fewer coils
located around the perimeter of the "workspace" containing the tiny machines.
However, this "global" field is not fine enough to control individual microrobots
independently.
"The approach we came up with works at the microscale, and it will be the first one
that can give truly independent motion of multiple microrobots in the same
workspace because we are able to produce localized fields as opposed to a global
field," Cappelleri said. "What we can do now, instead of having these coils all around
on the outside, is to print planar coils directly onto the substrate."
The robots are moved using attractive or repulsive forces and by varying the
strength of the electrical current in the coils.

"You can think about using teams of robots to assemble components on a small
scale, which we could use for microscale additive manufacturing," Cappelleri said.
Independently controlled microbots working in groups might be useful in building
microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, minuscule machines that could have
numerous applications from medicine to homeland security.
"So far people have been good at making MEMS devices containing different
components," he said. "But a lot of times the components are made from different
processes and then have to be assembled to make the final device. This is very
challenging. We can instead assemble them with our robots. And on the biological
side we might use them for cell sorting, cell manipulation, characterization and so
on. You could think about putting the microcoils on the bottom of a petri dish."
Microbots equipped with probe-like "force sensors" might then be used to detect
cancer cells in a biopsy.
"Cancer cells have different stiffness characteristics than non-cancer cells, and in
some of our previous work we put force sensors on the end of these robots to figure
out which ones are stiffer than others," Cappelleri said.
The coils were made by printing a copper pattern with the same technology used to
manufacture printed circuit boards. They can be scaled down from their current size
of about 4 millimeters. A new process, however, was needed to create a microscale
prototype, he said.
The research is ongoing. The team will attempt to use microscale prototypes to
assemble components for MEMS devices. One potential obstacle is the effect of van
der Waals forces between molecules that are present on the scale of microns but
not on the macroscale of everyday life. The forces might cause "stiction" between
tiny components that affect their operation.
The National Science Foundation (grants IIS-1358446 and IIS-1302283) funded the
research.
Writer: Emil Venere, 765-494-4709, venere@purdue.edu
Source: David J. Cappelleri, 765.494.3719, dcappell@purdue.edu
Note to Journalists: A copy of the research paper is available by contacting Emil
Venere, venere@purdue.edu, 765-494-4709
ABSTRACT
Towards Independent Control of Multiple Magnetic Mobile Microrobots
Sagar Chowdhury, Wuming Jing and David J. Cappelleri *
School of Mechanical Engineering, Purdue University
* Correspondence: dcappell@purdue.edu ; Tel.:+1-765-494-371

In this paper, we have developed an approach for independent autonomous

navigation of multiple microrobots under the influence of magnetic fields and
validated it experimentally. We first developed a heuristics based planning
algorithm for generating collision-free trajectories for the microrobots that are
suitable to be executed by an available magnetic field. Second, we have modeled
the dynamics of the microrobots to develop a controller for determining the forces
that need to be generated for the navigation of the robots along the trajectories at a
suitable control frequency. Next, an optimization routine is developed to determine
the input currents to the electromagnetic coils that can generate the required forces
for the navigation of the robots at the controller frequency. We then validated our
approach by simulating an electromagnetic system that contains an array of sixtyfour magnetic microcoils designed for generating local magnetic fields suitable for
simultaneous independent actuation of multiple microrobots. Finally, we prototyped
an mm-scale version of the system and present experimental results showing the
validity of our approach.