A multi - faceted microrobot

The transformer robot was taught to become different bacteria in order to make its way to the goal more efficiently

These robots can be used for targeted drug delivery or medical sensing

Evgenia Shcherbina, "The Attic"

British and Swiss engineers, inspired by the forms of bacteria that cause ulcers, cholera and Lyme disease, have created flexible robots that are able to change the shape of the body, floating in a liquid and adapting to changes in its viscosity.

A fragment of the video on YouTube

One of the directions of modern robotics is the creation of flexible and soft micro robots based on polymers with different characteristics that could penetrate into the human body and perform medical tasks there.

Engineers are often inspired to create robots of various forms by animals. This time, as engineers write in an article in Science Advances (Huang et al., Adaptive locomotion of artificial microswimmers), they were inspired by bacteria: cholera vibrions V. cholerae, shaped like a tube with a helical flagellum, stem bacteria (a popular model organism C.Crescentus) in the form of a tube with a straight and flat flagellum, pathogens of gastric ulcer H.pylori in the form of a spiral with several flagella and Lyme disease pathogens B.burgdorferi, having the shape of a spiral.

From left to right and from top to bottom: vibrio cholerae V.cholerae, C.Crescentus, the causative agent of gastric ulcer H.pylori and the causative agent of Lyme disease B.burgdorferi (A. Lapushko, wikimedia commons).

From a single hydrogel film, scientists made hundreds of samples of robots of different shapes and made them float in media with different densities and viscosities, for example, in a sucrose solution with a viscosity close to blood. In such an environment, stem robots moved better than other prototypes. However, with increasing viscosity, it was these robots that became outsiders, since their "body" could no longer move synchronously with the flagellum and only increased resistance. But the "Lime robots" in the form of a spiral proved to be the best in a more viscous environment. Corkscrew-like movement in such an environment turned out to be more effective.

Having found out that a tubular body with a flat tail is preferable for swimming at low viscosity, and a spiral body at high viscosity, engineers created a robot that could change its configuration in response to an increase in the concentration of sucrose in the liquid. This robot can change shape depending on the conditions without losing maneuverability in speed.

Pathogenic bacteria are so effective in their ability to infect the body, not least because of their shape, which allows them to move quickly through the bloodstream. Having borrowed these forms from microbes, scientists have created robots that may also be able to move in the body in the future, but for good purposes – for example, to deliver medicines or detect damage in the body.

If floating organisms help to create floating robots, then animals that know how to do it best become prototypes of jumping robots. So, a forest animal living in trees, galago, became a prototype for a jumping robot.

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