Domino Reaction Encoded Heterogeneous Colloidal Microswarm with On‐Demand Morphological Adaptability

Abstract

Emulating natural swarm intelligence with group‐level functionality in artificial micro/nanorobotic systems offers an opportunity to sublimate the limited functions of individuals and revolutionize their applications. However, achieving synchronous operation of microswarms with environmental adaptability and cooperative tasking capability remains a challenge. Here, an adaptive and heterogeneous colloidal magnetic microswarm with domino reaction encoded cooperative functions is presented. Through programming external magnetic fields, the system self‐organizes into two swarm states, that is, vortex and ribbon microswarms, which can switch between each other reversibly within seconds, allowing to traverse tortuous, branched, and confined environments through adaptive morphological transformation. By specializing subgroups of building blocks with separate functions, cooperative tasking capability is integrated into the heterogeneous system following a “division of labor” manner. Given targeted therapy as a proof‐of‐concept task, the coordinated delivery of heterogeneous colloidal system across a complex environment with an access rate higher than 90% is demonstrated, and the specialization and cooperation between building blocks to disrupt multiple growth pathways of cancer cells via domino reaction are realized. The reconfigurable microswarm with hierarchical functionality presents a bioinspired approach to adapt to environmental variations and address multitasking requirements, which advances the development of microrobotic swarms and promises major benefits in biomedical fields.

Decoupling and Reprogramming the Wiggling Motion of Midge Larvae Using a Soft Robotic Platform

“…Besides, the robot body could potentially absorb small molecular agents from the medium and deliver them at targeted position by expelling water to fulfill the drug loading and release tasks. [61,62] Several critical issues should be considered before the application of LarvaBot in the real world. First, the impact of the doped materials on the motility of the LarvaBot needs to be evaluated.…”

Will future microbots be task-specific customized machines or multi-purpose “all in one” vehicles?

“…In particular, bio-inspired responsive materials offer tremendous promise for designing theranostic microbots, integrating the sense and release functions. Alternately, it may be possible to combine different single-function microbots in swarms for performing different operational tasks 11 . Despite the major progress towards developing such bio-inspired microbots there is still a long way for the performance of synthetic microbots to compete with the sophistication of nature’s biomotors.…”

“…These attractive capabilities have paved the way to sophisticated microscale robotic devices capable of performing complex tasks and have motivated researchers to explore exciting new important in vivo biomedical applications ranging from targeted drug delivery to precise surgery and intracellular biosensing 8 – 10 . While the scaling down of robotic platforms has tremendous potential for advancing the treatment and diagnosis of patients, it also brings fundamental engineering challenges such as power sourcing, motion control and tracking, integration of multifunctionality, safety and related recovery and degradation capabilities 11 . Unlike large robots, the tiny footprint of microbots greatly hampers the ability to integrate multiple functions (without compromising their dimensions).…”

Control and Autonomy of Microrobots: Recent Progress and Perspective

“…However, to improve the adaptability of the swarm for more complicated working environments, active controllable deformation and reconfiguration are more worthy of studying. [188,189] Z. Zhou et al applied dual-frequency acoustic signal on an aluminum substrate, the nodal point at the interaction of the two nodal lines could attract and trap particles to form a swarm. [179] By adjusting the ratio between the amplitude of the two acoustic signals, the swarm would elongate or contract accordingly.…”