Incredible nano-robots have been designed to navigate through human blood vessels and deliver medications with unprecedented accuracy and precision. Researchers at ETH Zurich have successfully developed novel micromachines, made of plastic and metal.
"Metals and polymers have different properties, and both materials offer certain advantages in building micromachines. Our goal was to benefit from all these properties simultaneously by combining the two," commented Carlos Alcântara, former doctoral student in Salvador Pané's group at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems and one of the lead authors of the paper.
Professor Salvador Pané has previously been working with a high-precision 3D printing technique that produces complex objects on the micrometer level, known as 3D lithography. The ETH scientists used this method to produce a template for their micromachines. Each template has narrow grooves that serve as a negative and can be filled with the chosen materials.
"Our interdisciplinary group consists of electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, chemists, and materials scientists who all work closely together. That was the key to developing this method," explained Fabian Landers, a doctoral student in Pané's group and the other lead author of the paper. Their research has been published in the journal, Nature Communications.
Image Credit: Alcântara et al. Nature Communications 2020