MEXICO: Scientists have announced they have successfully simplified 3D printing technology in order to engineer multipurpose fish-shaped microbots powered by nanoparticles that can react to both hydrogen peroxide and to magnets.
Researchers are calling this bots “microfish” and they believe these could be the next generation of smart robots which could be used for applications for things like sensing and directing drug deliver, blood detoxification, and more.
“We have developed an entirely new method to engineer nature-inspired microscopic swimmers that have complex geometric structures and are smaller than the width of a human hair. With this method, we can easily integrate different functions inside these tiny robotic swimmers for a broad spectrum of applications,” explains lead study co-author Wei Zhu.
The UC San Diego nanoengineering student in the Jacobs School of Engineering notes that this newer 3-D printing method is called microscale continuous optical printing (μCOP), and it has the capability of printing an array of hundreds of these microfish in only a matter of seconds.
