Related papers: 3D Modular Microrobots: Micro-Origami Cubes with I…
3D printing of high-quality silica photonic structures is particularly challenging, as surface roughness at the nanoscale can severely degrade optical performance through scattering losses. Here, we develop a technique to fold ultrasmooth…
The exciting field of stretchable electronics (SE) promises numerous novel applications, particularly in-body and medical diagnostics devices. However, future advanced SE miniature devices will require high-density, extremely stretchable…
Digital coding metasurfaces have revolutionized electromagnetic (EM) manipulation, yet typical tunable approaches based on active components suffer from the "volatility" bottleneck. While mechanical modulation provides a potential solution,…
The recent advancements in nanoscale 3D printing and microfabrication techniques have reinvigorated research on microrobots. However, precise motion control of the microrobots on biological environments using compact actuation setups…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Flexible microelectronics has shown tremendous promise in a broad spectrum of applications, especially those that cannot be addressed by conventional microelectronics in rigid materials and constructions1-3. These unconventional yet…
Origami design principles are scale invariant and enable direct miniaturization of origami structures provided the sheets used for folding have equal thickness to length ratios. Recently, seminal steps have been taken to fabricate…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
At the cutting edge of materials science, matter is designed to self-organize into structures that perform a wide range of functions. The past two decades have witnessed major innovations in the versatility of building blocks, ranging from…
Soft robotics leverages deformable materials to develop robots capable of navigating unstructured and dynamic environments. Silicone Voxel-Based Soft Robots (Silibots) are a type of pneumatically actuated soft robots that rely on the…
Programmable folding of elastic sheets typically relies on predefined flexible creases or active materials-enabled hinges, which lack intrinsic bistability and limit reprogrammability within a single structure. Here, we present a…
Microrobots engineered from self-propelling active particles, extend the reach of robotic operations to submillimeter dimensions and are becoming increasingly relevant for various tasks, such as manipulation of micro/nanoscale cargo,…
This study describes the development and validation of a novel microgravity experimental platform that is mainly applied to small robots such as modular self-reconfigurable robots. This platform mainly consists of an air supply system, a…
The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…
Microelectronic morphogenesis is the creation and maintenance of complex functional structures by microelectronic information within shape-changing materials. Only recently has in-built information technology begun to be used to reshape…
A new type of microfluidic system for biological cell manipulation, a CMOS/microfluidic hybrid, is demonstrated. The hybrid system starts with a custom-designed CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) chip fabricated in a…
Three-dimensional (3D) micro-electromagnets were developed to control particle motion in magnetic field landscapes in vacuum near a chip. Multiple layers of micron-scale conductors separated by transparent insulators create particle…
Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…
Research on the co-optimization of soft robotic design and control requires rapid means for real-world validation. Existing creation pipelines do not allow for the swift prototyping of soft robots to quickly test various design…
This paper introduces a cube-based reconfigurable robot that utilizes an electromagnet-based actuation framework to reconfigure in three dimensions via pivoting. While a variety of actuation mechanisms for self-reconfigurable robots have…