Under this project, a multidisciplinary team of physicists, chemical engineers, roboticists, and electrical engineers will create a new class of cell-sized robots that incorporate on-board chemical sensors, photovoltaics, and electronic logic. The robots will be powered by an external light source, where changes in the color of the light can be used to trigger different sets of actions. The robots will be fabricated as a flat sheet, using the same scalable processes that are used to manufacture computer chips. Precisely designed cuts and actuated hinges will enable the robot to stretch and bend into arbitrarily shaped two-dimensional surfaces. The result will be a fully functional autonomous robot, capable of moving and changing shape in response to external stimuli, such as chemical gradients in the environment. Ultimately such robots may be used to navigate through the body and interact with targeted tissues and organs. The result may be new approaches for treatment of disease, or mitigation of harmful bacterial biofilms. The project includes activities to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in research and advance engineering and science education.
This grant will support development of micrometer-scale robotic metamaterial surfaces that can reversibly transform into arbitrary three-dimensional shapes for microscale locomotion towards a soft tissue analogue secreting biochemical signals, wrap around it and polymerize to encapsulate the tissue analogue. The robot design is predicated on the idea that controlling the local expansion or contraction of a surface makes possible the transformation of a planar sheet into any two-dimensional surface. This design principle will be achieved by lithographically fabricating a micrometer-scale metamaterial sheet with negative Poisson ratio consisting of panels and connecting actuating hinges. The negative Poisson ratio will enable the sheet to locally expand, change its Gaussian curvature, and adopt a variety of shapes. Mature fabrication technologies will be used to equip the panels with chemical sensors and distributed control circuits that will control hinge actuation. Collectively, the ability to process chemical signals into electronic actuation and locomotion modes that allow the robot to move, wrap, and polymerize around the chemical source will substantially expand the frontiers of soft microrobotics.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
