Sustainably Grown: The Underdog Robots of the Future

TL;DR

The paper discusses emerging trends in micro-robotics and bottom-up robotic fabrication, highlighting their potential to revolutionize applications from medical monitoring to artificial life creation.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of micro-robots and bottom-up robotics as transformative approaches, emphasizing their bio-inspired design and potential impact on future robotics.

Findings

Micro-robots can perform medical tasks like cell delivery and fertilization.

Bottom-up robotics enables the growth of robots from solution media.

Micro-robots are inspired by biological microswimmers and bacteria.

Abstract

It is hard to imagine with the progress in robotics that current approaches are lacking somewhere, yet they will not be applicable to the majority of robots in the near future. We are on the verge of two new transitions that will transform robotics. One is already under way -- the miniaturization of robots, to the point where invisible, microscopic robots could be around us and inside us, performing monitoring or even life-saving functions. We have seen systematic bio-inspired efforts to create microbe-like, microscopic robots. The trend has parallels with miniaturization in the electronics industry, where exponentially smaller and more energy efficient units have been produced each generation. To put this statement in context, examples already include magnetic microswimmer robots, employing bacterial modes of locomotion, which are biocompatible, potentially ready for integration within our bodies. They require lithography to create clever microscopic screw-type structures, enough to produce the cork-screw swimming movement. Such micro-robots have encapsulated, picked, and delivered cells, protecting them from shear forces in fluids, while others have captured non-motile sperm, propelled them, and ultimately fertilized an egg. We explore how such developments in micro-robots will change our world in the relatively near future. The second trend is bottom-up robotics, growing robots from a solution medium, as if they were bacteria. This field is emerging at the intersection of a number of disciplines, discussed below. An overarching common theme is the creation of artificial life from a non-biological starting point.