Tiny, Folding Actuators Spark New Ideas for Medical Nanorobots

“We want to have robots that are microscopic but have brains on board,” said Prof. Itai Cohen  , professor of physics at Cornell University. In fact, Prof. Cohen and the Cornell team created what is potentially the world’s smallest self-folding origami bird. The bird's micron-sized shape memory actuators fold themselves into 3D configurations, within 100 miillseconds. The tiny robots can also flatten and refold themselves thousands of times, and only need a single volt to be powered to life.

Next, the researchers are working to combine their shape memory actuators with circuits. A successful integration will potentially enable robotic surgical instruments that are 10 times smaller than current devices, as well as nanorobots that can clean bacterial infection from human tissue.

Transcript

00:00:01 we essentially demonstrated that we can fold the world's smallest self-folding origami bird with shape memory so it can hold its shape indefinitely and this uh really kind of illustrates the vision that we have going forward for this micro robotics work the kinds of complicated shapes that we're going to be able to

00:00:18 actuate hold and then work around in order to get the functions that we're interested in for our microscopic robots it's an enormous engineering challenge to figure out how to make something like that have the kind of functionalities we want one thing that's quite remarkable is that the material out of we

00:00:38 we make these actuators these little tiny layers are only about 30 atoms thicker so they're just literally nanoscopic in size where you could count the number of atoms from the top and the bottom compared to a sheet of paper which might be a hundred thousand atoms thick at this small scale it's not like a

00:00:58 traditional mechanical engineering but all the chemistry material science and the mechanical engineering all mixed together so the biggest challenge is to figure out what's the chemical reaction at the surface of this nanometer thin film and to make a connection between this change of chemical composition and their

00:01:18 mechanical behavior why do we want to build such functional robots at this scale well think of all the things that robots do for us at the macro scale roombas sweep our floors factory robots build our cars and other machines robots perform surgeries and explore

00:01:39 distant planets now imagine a world where we create robots with a similar degree of functionality at the micro scale we have a micro factory that transforms the way we make things and develop surgical robotic instruments that can perform more delicate surgeries on length scales smaller by a factor of

00:02:02 10 compared to what we can currently do what sort of worlds will we be able to investigate and explore when we can now interact with biology on the scale of cellular organisms