Microscopic Robots

Living machines?

Other microbots being created are not solely machines. Several institutes have been involved in incorporating organic living tissue with inorganic components to create hybrid devices that are part machine, part organism. The first such devices were self-assembling microbots powered by living heart muscle, created by engineers at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Each tiny robot is composed of an arch of gold connected to a sheath of cardiac muscle grown from rat cells, and if released in the body, it feeds off glucose in the blood to get energy to move. To test the microbots, the researchers immersed them in a protein and sugar solution that mimicked internal body conditions. As the heart muscle contracted and then relaxed, the microbot could be seen to 'walk' forward.

These microbots could potentially be used in microsurgery, for example to clear out the build up of plaques within arteries. The technology also has potential for creating new legs or fingers for amputees by allowing new muscle cells to grow over artificial bones.

 

 

Credit: UCLA

 

Self-assembled microbot developed at UCLA.

But research into these various methods is still in its infancy and there are many problems to overcome. The robots created by the researchers at UCLA can only move in one direction and are not easy to control. They are now looking to see if using skeletal muscle instead of heart muscle could help the robots move more freely: heart muscle tends to beat at its own rhythm and so is hard to control. Using electricity to stimulate skeletal muscle could allow researchers to turn the robots on and off, and extend their use to sources of power for tiny body implants or mini electrical generators that power computer chips.