Herding Microrobots

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."

So far, most control methods have involved pushing and pulling the tiny machines with magnetic fields. This approach has enabled them to zoom around on the face of a dime, pushing tiny objects or swim through blood vessels. However, these systems generally require complex setups of coils to generate the electromagnetic field or specialized components, and getting the robots to carry out a task can be difficult.

Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke, took a different approach, developing a microrobot that responds to electrostatic potential and is powered with voltage through an electric-array surface.…

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