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
Giant Unilamellar Vesicles for Designing Cell-like Microrobots
The field of microrobotics has been experiencing significant advancements driven by the need for precise controllability, targeted delivery, and high accuracy at different size scales. However, despite these advancements, synthetic microrobots face challenges in terms of biocompatibility, adaptability, and functional integration within the complex biological environments of the human body. This has led to a growing interest in biocompatible and adaptable cell-like microrobots, which offer several advantages over their purely synthetic counterparts and can reproduce the adaptability of natural cells.
GUVs are spherical lipid bilayers that can encapsulate various substances, making them excellent candidates for drug delivery and other biomedical applications. Their large size enables easy modification of both the inner part and the membrane and incorporation of functional components. Owing to their soft nature, GUVs can undergo shape-changing deformations, like cells, enabling microrobots to adapt to varying environments and complex 3D structures.
In this project, we introduce a novel cell-like microrobot design that is active, and self-propelled under the electric field from two passive structures. Achieving an autonomous motion of GUVs has always been a challenge in the field due to their soft and deformable structure making them less responsive to external forces. We show that silica particles can break the symmetry by creating asymmetric flows around the vesicles. Since the attachment of the particles by DEP forces relies on physical interactions, the propulsion mechanism is controllable and reversible. By varying the size or type of particles attached to the GUVs, our system can induce motion in larger GUVs or achieve different propulsion characteristics.
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