Robots are excellent tools for gathering information from areas humans can’t reach. And now new speck-sized machines from MIT could extend that capability to carrying out diagnostics inside the human body, wafting through the air to spot pollutants, or even detecting leaks in oil and gas pipelines.
These devices don’t really fit the conventional vision of what a robot looks like. The machines described in a recent
paper in Nature Nanotechnology are actually just a collection of sensors, computation, and memory attached to tiny particles called colloids.
Roughly the size of a human egg cell, these colloids can remain suspended indefinitely in a liquid or even in air. Researchers say this allows the devices to travel much greater distances than most other micro or nanoscale robots designed to propel themselves through their local environments.
Colloids have been put to work by scientists before, but the researchers say this is the first time they’ve been combined with electronics. Getting electronics to adhere to such tiny particles is not trivial, because standard silicon electronics typically need to be attached to a flat surface and are also relatively power-hungry, making it challenging to power them.
So the researchers experimented with a variety of emerging thin-film electronic materials, including graphene, which remain attached to the colloids’ less uniform shape and also require a fraction of the power of conventional electronics.
This means they can be powered by harvesting light using a simple photodiode, an electronic component that generates a tiny electrical current when it absorbs photons. Apart from the power source, the researchers attached chemical sensors, logic components, and memory so the devices could collect, process, and store information about their environment.
The robots aren’t capable of actively transmitting this data, so the researchers also attached tiny reflectors that allow a laser-scanning device to locate them so that the data can then be read out. However, they plan to eventually add communication capabilities to future devices so they don’t have to be physically collected after carrying out their missions.
One potential application for these devices is monitoring airborne materials like bacteria, dust, or smoke over a large area. Most proposals for how to do this involve satellites, fleets of drones, or extensive networks of ground-based sensors.
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