Enhanced Flexible Mold Lifetime for Roll‐to‐Roll Scaled‐Up Manufacturing of Adhesive Complex Microstructures
Bioinspired Microstructured Adhesives with Facile and Fast Switchability for Part Manipulation in Dry and Wet Conditions
Smart Materials for manipulation and actuation of small-scale structures
3D nanofabrication of various materials for advanced multifunctional microrobots
Liquid Crystal Mesophase of Supercooled Liquid Gallium And Eutectic Gallium–Indium
Machine Learning-Based Pull-off and Shear Optimal Adhesive Microstructures
Information entropy to detect order in self-organizing systems
Individual and collective manipulation of multifunctional bimodal droplets in three dimensions
Microrobot collectives with reconfigurable morphologies and functions
Self-organization in heterogeneous and non-reciprocal regime
Biomimetic Emulsion Systems
Giant Unilamellar Vesicles for Designing Cell-like Microrobots
Bioinspired self-assembled colloidal collectives drifting in three dimensions underwater
3D assembly-based fabrication of complex, soft, multimaterial millirobots
When the size of soft-bodied machines approach the sub-millimeter scale, their designs and functionalities are severely constrained by the available fabrication methods, which only work with limited materials, geometries, and magnetization profiles. To free such constraints, we propose a jig-assisted approach to 3D assemble microscale building blocks, voxels, to fabricate soft millimachines with non-magnetic/magnetic multimaterials, 3D complex geometry and magnetic programming, and 3D-to-3D shape morphing [
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This proposed approach helps us concurrently realize diverse characteristics on the machines, including programmable shape morphing, negative Poisson’s ratio, complex stiffness distribution, directional joint bending, and remagnetization for shape reconfiguration. This project enlarges the machine design space and enhances the machine functionality substantially. It enables the creation of functional machines with complex designs that are tailored to specific biomedical applications, which are previously difficult to achieve, including peristaltic pumping of biological fluids and transport of solid objects, active targeted cargo transport and delivery, liquid biopsy, and reversible surface anchoring in tortuous tubular environments withstanding fluid flows, all at the sub-millimeter scale. This project advances the achievable complexity of 3D magnetic soft machines and boosts their future capabilities.
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