Soft micromachines with programmable motility and morphology

By Hen-Wei Huang, Mahmut Selman Sakar, Andrew J. Petruska, S. Pané, Bradley J. Nelson. Nature Communications, 2016

564 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Nature provides a wide range of inspiration for building mobile micromachines that can navigate through confined heterogenous environments and perform minimally invasive environmental and biomedical operations. For example, microstructures fabricated in the form of bacterial or eukaryotic flagella can act as artificial microswimmers. Due to limitations in their design and material properties, these simple micromachines lack multifunctionality, effective addressability and manoeuvrability in complex environments. Here we develop an origami-inspired rapid prototyping process for building self-folding, magnetically powered micromachines with complex body plans, reconfigurable shape and controllable motility. Selective reprogramming of the mechanical design and magnetic anisotropy of body parts dynamically modulates the swimming characteristics of the micromachines. We find that tail and body morphologies together determine swimming efficiency and, unlike for rigid swimmers, the choice of magnetic field can subtly change the motility of soft microswimmers. In nature many microorganisms are able to change their shape to adapt to the changes in the environment. Inspired by this phenomenon, here Huang et al. build artificial microswimmers with body and flagellum made of programmable hydrogel-based materials incorporated with magnetic nanoparticles.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/99d948043c591ea9b7ec67d45bb440e067f0ef25

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Wei Gao
2. Mokarram Hossain
3. A. Bastola

In Mechanical Engineering

1. J. Fu
2. Miao Yu
3. Mokarram Hossain
4. A. Bastola
5. Hengyu Guo
6. Zhong Lin Wang

Citations in the corpus

• Micro/Nanorobots for Biomedicine: Delivery, Surgery, Sensing, and Detoxification (2017, background): “Nanorobots are also desired to be soft and deformable to ensure maneuverability and mechanical compliance to human body and tissues (91,92).”
• The shape – morphing performance of magnetoactive soft materials (2021, background): “present various time lapses of two different machines (c-ii) (adapted from [257]).”
• 3D printed shape-programmable magneto-active soft matter for biomimetic applications (2020, background): “With a wide range of actuations such as electric fields [2–4], chemicals [5,6], heat [7,8], light [9,10], pressure [11,12] or magnetic fields [13–19], soft active materials have the potential to create mechanical functionalities beyond those of traditional machines [20].”
• Multifunctional biohybrid magnetite microrobots for imaging-guided therapy (2017, background): “To enable magnetic actuation at the microscale and/or nanoscale, magnetic robots of various structures—such as rigid-flexible nanowires (13, 16, 17), microspheres (18, 19), ellipsoids (20, 21), helices (7, 22–25), filaments (26), and even arbitrary shapes (27, 28)—have been developed.”