Spinning-enabled wireless amphibious origami millirobot

Abstract

Wireless millimeter-scale origami robots have recently been explored with great potential for biomedical applications. Existing millimeter-scale origami devices usually require separate geometrical components for locomotion and functions. Additionally, none of them can achieve both on-ground and in-water locomotion. Here we report a magnetically actuated amphibious origami millirobot that integrates capabilities of spinning-enabled multimodal locomotion, delivery of liquid medicine, and cargo transportation with wireless operation. This millirobot takes full advantage of the geometrical features and folding/unfolding capability of Kresling origami, a triangulated hollow cylinder, to fulfill multifunction: its geometrical features are exploited for generating omnidirectional locomotion in various working environments through rolling, flipping, and spinning-induced propulsion; the folding/unfolding is utilized as a pumping mechanism for controlled delivery of liquid medicine; furthermore, the spinning motion provides a sucking mechanism for targeted solid cargo transportation. We anticipate the amphibious origami millirobots can potentially serve as minimally invasive devices for biomedical diagnoses and treatments.

Miniature Amphibious Robot Actuated by Rigid‐Flexible Hybrid Vibration Modules

“…The relative aquatic speed is ≈2.3 BL s –1 , which is not that fast as the terrestrial speed, but still better than most amphibious robots. It is worth noting that some robots are excited by external magnetic field, [ 18 , 57 ] which facilitates their miniaturization. However, the excitation source is not possible to be integrated.…”

“…This robot exhibits superior performance on relative motion speed compared with other typical amphibious robots. [2,10,12,14,[39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] In particular, the relative terrestrial speed reaches to ≈10.9 BL s -1 , which shows the significant superiority of this design. The relative aquatic speed is ≈2.3 BL s -1 , which is not that fast as the terrestrial speed, but still better than most amphibious robots.…”

Motile Living Biobots Self-Construct from Adult Human Somatic Progenitor Seed Cells

“…Most other bots that are biologically inspired but non-organic tend to have sizes that are visible to the naked eye with microbots having a diameter ∼260 micrometers 90 , and crab-inspired robots around 500-700 micrometers 91 are thus a few times the size of an average Anthrobot. Other bots have had larger sizes, like the magnetically controlled soft-body milirobot ∼3.7 mm 92 , the water droplet manipulating magnetic-actuated robot ∼ 2.4 mm 93 and the origami milirobot ∼6-8 mm 94 of which the largest was the aforementioned insect-inspired robot with a size of <20 mm=20000 micrometer 89 , which is tens to hundreds of times the size of the Anthrobots. Like many modern robotics platforms, they are not single-scale, deterministic, human-programmed, inorganic devices 95–101 , but instead offer a tantalizing mix of baseline competencies that could eventually be managed and augmented by environmental stimuli and the addition of smart materials, circuits, and behavior-shaping protocols.…”

Ingestible Functional Magnetic Robot with Localized Flexibility (MR-LF)

“…Approximately half of previous small-scale, flexible magnetic robots demonstrated cargo transportation capabilities (see Table S1, Supporting Information), including impressive reports of robots capable of transporting cargos 20 times the robot body weight and three times the robot volume (Wu et al, 2022), and more than 100 times robot body weight (Lu et al, 2018). However, only five identified robots (Ze et al, 2022b;Joyee and Pan, 2019b;Hu et al, 2018;Ze et al, 2022a;Wu et al, 2022) included an internal compartment. Advantages of a compartment include easier integration and protection in harsh environments.…”