Tiny Microbots May Have Electrically-Activated Muscles that Work Like a Human's

Imagine robots with muscles. Does it sound like science fiction? It may actually be closer to reality than you'd think. Scientists have shown how chains of self-assembling particles could potentially serve as electrically activated muscles in machines that are smaller than a grain of sand.

The machines are called microbots and while you may think that something so tiny wouldn't be all that useful, you'd be mistaken. Microbots could be a huge boon in areas, such as medicine and manufacturing. Yet they also face challenges when it comes to their creation, including the problem of actually building the microbots and then making them mobile.

That's why scientists decided to see how they could actually cause the robots to move. In this case, the scientists showed that some gold plating and an alternating electric field can help oblong particles form chains that extend by roughly 36 percent when the electric field is on.

"What's really important in the field of nanotechnology right now is not just assembling into structures, but assembling into structures that can change or shape-shift," said Sharon Glotzer, one of the researchers, in a news release.

The researchers used particles similar to those found in pain with diameters of about a hundredth the width of a strand of human hair. Then, they stretched the particles into football shapes and coated one side of each "football" with gold. The gilded halves attracted on another slightly in salty water, and left to their own devices, the particles formed short chains of overlapping pairs. When exposed to an electric field, the chains added new particles. But what was really interesting was the way that the chains stretched-like muscles.

While the force created by the fibers is about 1,000 times weaker than human muscle tissue, the fact that they work in the same way could potentially be enough for microbots.

"If we can get the chains to swarm together, we can get them to lift loads, move around, do things that biological muscles do," said Michael Solomon, the lead researcher.

The findings are a huge step forward when it comes to research with microbots. This could help give these tiny robots the mobility they need in the future.