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 places inside the human body.
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 places inside the human body.
The researchers describe their mini healthcare providers in a paper published last month in the journal Small.
“Imagine if microrobots could perform certain tasks in the body, such as non-invasive surgeries,” said Jin Lee, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. “Instead of cutting into the patient, we can simply introduce the robots to the body through a pill or an injection, and they would perform the procedure themselves.”
Lee and his colleagues aren’t there yet, but the new research is big step forward for tiny robots.
The group’s microrobots are really small. Each one measures only 20 micrometers wide, several times smaller than the width of a human hair. They’re also really fast, capable of traveling at speeds of about 3 millimeters per second, or roughly 9,000 times their own length per minute. That’s many times faster than a cheetah in relative terms.
They have a lot of potential, too. In the new study, the group deployed fleets of these machines to transport doses of dexamethasone, a common steroid medication, to the bladders of lab mice.
