U.S. engineers develop miniaturized warehouse robots for biotechnology applications

2020-02-27 Xinhua Editor：Li Yan

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed minuscule warehouse logistics robots that could help expedite and automate medical diagnostic technologies and other applications that move and manipulate tiny drops of fluid, according to a study published on Wednesday.

The robots are disc-shaped magnets about 2 mm in diameter, designed to work together to move and manipulate droplets of blood or other fluids, with precision. The study was published in Science Robotics.

The robots, called by researchers "ferrobots," can be programmed to perform massively parallelized and sequential fluidic operations at small-length scales in a collaborative manner.

To control the robots' motion, electromagnetic tiles in the chip pull the "ferrobots" along desired paths, much like using magnets to move metal chess pieces from underneath a chess board.

"We were inspired by the transformational impact of networked mobile robot systems on manufacturing, storage and distribution industries, such as those used to efficiently sort and transport packages at Amazon warehouses," said Sam Emaminejad, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the UCLA and the study's corresponding senior author.

"So, we set out to implement the same level of automation and mobility in a microfluidic setting. But our 'factory floor' is much smaller, about the size of your palm, and our goods, the fluid droplets, are as small as a few tenths of a millimeter," Emaminejad said.

The "factory floor" is an index card-sized chip, designed by the researchers, with internal structures that help manipulate fluid droplets transported by the robots.

The robots moved at 10 cm per second and performed more than 10,000 cyclic motions during a 24-hour period in the experiments. In addition to transportation, other functions such as dispensing, merging and filtering of fluid samples were demonstrated as the "ferrobots" interacted with structures on the chip.