Herding Swarms of Microrobots
Tiny robots self-assemble with a single command.
By Kristina Grifantin
Imagine a swarm of microrobots—tiny devices a few hair widths across—swimming through your blood vessels and repairing damage, or zipping around in computer chips as a security lock, or quickly knitting together heart tissue. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and Duke University have shown how to use a single electrical signal to command a group of microrobots to self-assemble into larger structures. The researchers hope to use this method to build biological tissues. But for microrobots to do anything like that, researchers must first figure out a good way to control them.
"When things are very small, they tend to stick together," says Jason Gorman, a robotics researcher in the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST who co-organizes an annual microrobotics competition that draws groups from around the world. "A lot of the locomotion methods that have been developed are focused on overcoming or leveraging this adhesion."
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37482/?p1=A1&a=f
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