Researchers at TU Eindhoven have developed an unusual robot. They have come up with a 'parcel delivery robot': a 2-centimetre plastic mini robot that can 'walk' under the influence of blue light and pick up and deliver parcels. In the future, it should be possible to use this to deliver medicines inside the human body, or to carry out simple repairs in chip machines, for example.
The robot requires no batteries, computer chips or wiring to be set in motion: it moves its ‘arms’ and ‘legs’ through light-based control, according to a press release. It uses its arms to carry small parcels on its back. The robot picks up its parcels, which are suspended from the ceiling, and then delivers them neatly to the correct location. The robot is made of light-sensitive polymers, which were also developed by Eindhoven University. When it was developed in 2017, it could only wriggle straight ahead. The material has now been further developed by PhD student Marina Pilz da Cunha and Master’s student Bas Ambergen in a collaboration between the research groups led by Jaap den Toonder and Albert Schenning.
Shrink and expand
The material owes its mobility to the fact that, under the influence of light, one side of it shrinks and the other side expands. Pilz da Cunha: "The robot's legs stretch when light shines on it, and, on the contrary, bend when the light goes out. That's how it takes steps."
Depending on the direction from which the light shines, the researchers determine the walking direction of the mini robot. "This way, we let it make turns," Pilz da Cunha said. Moreover, the arms and legs can be controlled independently of each other because they are different colours. As a result, they respond to different wavelengths of light.
Through the bloodstream
Although the road from lab to practice is still long, the researchers see a lot of potential for the mini robot. Den Toonder: "In the future, this application could, for example, be used in the human body, to deliver drugs there in the intestines or in the bloodstream. Or think, for example, of chip machines, through which this little robot can manoeuvre to make repairs."
The researchers plan to shrink the robot to less than a millimetre in size for those applications. Furthermore, they are going to perfect the controls. In a technical system, for example, the robot can follow a trail of lights, but in the human body this is already more difficult. "Perhaps we could then start working with heat," Pilz da Cunha suggests.
Source: TU Eindhoven.
