Treating liver cancer with microrobots piloted by a magnetic field
Canadian researchers led by Montreal radiologist Gilles Soulez have developed a novel approach to treat liver tumors using magnet-guided microrobots in an MRI device.
Canadian researchers led by Montreal radiologist Gilles Soulez have developed a novel approach to treat liver tumors using magnet-guided microrobots in an MRI device.
Bio & Medicine
Feb 14, 2024
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The limited ability of microrobots to assist drugs in entering cells hinders their therapeutic efficacy. To address this, a research team, reporting in Cyborg and Bionic Systems, has introduced the cancer-targeting molecule ...
Bio & Medicine
Jun 6, 2023
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11
A team of engineers at the University of Colorado Boulder has designed a new class of tiny, self-propelled robots that can zip through liquid at incredible speeds—and may one day even deliver prescription drugs to hard-to-reach ...
Bio & Medicine
May 24, 2023
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101
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST, President Yang Kook) Professor Hongsoo Choi's team of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering collaborated with Professor Sung-Won Kim's team at Seoul ...
Bio & Medicine
Sep 27, 2022
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139
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed microscopic robots, called microrobots, that can swim around in the lungs, deliver medication and be used to clear up life-threatening cases of bacterial ...
Bio & Medicine
Sep 22, 2022
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171
Swarms of microrobots injected into the human body could unblock internal medical devices and avoid the need for further surgery, according to new research from the University of Essex.
Bio & Medicine
Aug 18, 2022
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78
A team of scientists in the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems have combined robotics with biology by equipping E. coli bacteria with artificial components to construct biohybrid ...
Bio & Medicine
Jul 15, 2022
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298
Urinary tract infections are one of the most common afflictions caused by bacteria. It affects about 150 million people per year worldwide. Such types of infection are mainly associated with the presence of Escherichia coli, ...
Cell & Microbiology
Jul 13, 2022
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8
Medicinal microrobots could help physicians better treat and prevent diseases. But most of these devices are made with synthetic materials that trigger immune responses in vivo. Now, for the first time, researchers reporting ...
Bio & Medicine
Jul 13, 2022
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202
Microrobots have the potential to revolutionize medicine. Researchers at the Max Planck ETH Centre for Learning Systems have now developed an imaging technique that for the first time recognizes cell-sized microrobots individually ...
Bio & Medicine
May 12, 2022
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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.
Microbotics is that branch of robotics, which deals with the study and application of miniature ones like mobile robots of micrometre scale.
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, and a small robot would have dimensions less than 100 cm.
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. (ESL Inc., 1970)
The concept of building very small robots, and benefiting from recent advances in Micro Electro Mechanical Systems 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.
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.
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.
Nowadays, owing chiefly to wireless connections, like Wi-Fi (i.e. in domotic networks) the microbot's communication capacity has risen, so it can coordinate with other microbots to carry out more complex tasks.
As of 2008, the smallest microrobots use a Scratch Drive Actuator.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA