A Chinese and German collaborative team developed a soft tiny robot with a spring-like structure that can sense, grasp and move.
The biocompatible machine capable of manipulating in a single cell offered a potential strategy in precision medicine, such as microsurgery and targeted drug delivery, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
The researchers from the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research Dresden, and Chemnitz University of Technology, fabricated the magnetic spring system, an extremely sensitive one that can deform at a micron scale driven by minuscule strain.
The robot was inspired by some cells and microorganisms that use biological springs to perform actions such as sensing, predation, and driving.
"The system in a nanoscale size shows a sensitivity equivalent to one-thousandth of the gravity of a single cell," said Xu Haifeng from the SIAT, the corresponding and first author of the paper.
The spring-like robot can be customized into any shape and used as a sperm motility sensor, tweezer for cell manipulation, and self-driven miniature machine. (Xinhua)
An award-winning collaboration between Chinese and American researchers has pointed the way forward for the use of cloud computing to link different robots and make them more efficient. Using Internet-based computing in which remote servers are networked to share information, the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei and Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University have been testing how robots with very different specifications can communicate with each other and work together.
More than 2,000 robotics professionals and fans from 47 countries and regions worldwide gathered in Anhui province on Sunday as the 19th RoboCup kicked off in Hefei. The five-day annual contest includes robot soccer matches and contests for robots programmed in rescue and home service. This is the second time the RoboCup has taken place in a Chinese city. Suzhou, Jiangsu province, hosted the event in 2008.
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