February 29, 2004
Human Heart Cell moved MicroRobot
A team at UCLA has developed a microrobot powered by a human heart cell. Though this is a long way off from commercialization, it still represents an interesting application. The truth is that muscle cells are very robust compared to the usual things that we use in building small robots.
Posted by elkaim at February 29, 2004 10:30 PMWhatever the ultimate applications of the technology, no one was more surprised to see the tiny musclebots finally move than Carlos Montemagno, the microengineer whose team is developing them at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has spent three disappointing years trying, and failing, to harness living muscle tissue to propel a micromachine. But when he and his team looked into their microscopes, they were amazed to see the latest version of their musclebot crawling around.
The device is an arch of silicon 50 micrometres wide. Attached to the underside of the arch, the team has grown a cord of heart muscle fibres (see graphic). It is the contraction and relaxation of this cardiac tissue that makes the arch bend and stretch to produce the bot's crawling motion. And the muscle is fuelled by a simple glucose nutrient in a Petri dish.