Magnetic microrobot swarms - The following videos demonstrate some of the behaviors exhibited by our microrobot collectives. We switch on-demand between different behaviors by changing the global magnetic field signal. By tuning the global magnetic field signal, we can change how each microrobot rotates or oscillates about its center axis, which changes agents’ environmentally mediated interactions, and thus results in different collective behaviors.

Navigation through a maze

Heterogeneous microrobot swarms - By making the collective heterogeneous, we can “program” the microrobots to exert varying magnetic, hydrodynamic, and capillary forces on each other. In some instances, these forces may be asymmetric between pairs of microrobots which opens up a whole new set of studies in which we can explore how microrobots can be designed to exhibit non-reciprocal interactions to enable desired self-organization, formations, and locomotion trajectories. As shown in the videos below, we first target heterogeneity by size so the collective exhibits self-organization on-demand, manipulates passive particles in the surrounding environment, and deforms in desired shapes. In the SAM Lab, we aim to design heterogeneous microrobot swarms that are biocompatible, are able to split up into different groups according to the task at hand, and can function properly within complex and adverse environments.

Heterogeneous microrobots self-organize