An engine for running medical microbots

Doctors have miniaturized almost everything they need to send robots inside your brain's blood vessels to treat damaged tissue. But making a motor small enough to squeeze past blood cells has held things up. Now, engineers at Monash University in Australia have built a micromotor that brings bitty 'bots closer to reality.

Shrunken versions of standard electric motors, which use spinning magnets, have traditionally lacked power or required a bulky gear box to prevent them from spinning too fast. So the Monash engineers decided to power their 0.14-inch-tall motor, called Proteus, using reverse piezoelectricity — a phenomenon that converts an electric charge into motion — which lets it maintain power and run at a reasonable speed at any size. An electrified ceramic element oscillates up and down, twisting a springlike rod that turns a tiny ball. The ball's rotation could then spin a flagellum to help a robot swim.

Petite Power: The 0.14-inch-tall motor nearly fits on the tip of a pen  Courtesy Brett Watson/Monash University
The group plans to install the motor in a robot, test it in artificial blood vessels and, by next year, further shrink Proteus to 1/300 the size of an ice-cream sprinkle. Making the minuscule pieces won't be a problem, says Brett Watson, a member of the Monash team, but he says patience is key: "It's really hard to put the darn thing together."

Video courtesy MicroNanophysics Research Laboratory, Monash University, Melbourne Australia

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2 Comments

This is awesome. I can't wait until the day that I can finally inject a dose of nanobots that will boost the efficiency of my workout at the gym. Goodbye steroids. ha ha ha.
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Great technological advancement, but I am not putting that microbot in me. What will happen when you get a bad part creating it? Um Sorry Mr. Jones the microbot didnt have its oil change so the motor over worked itself and used the battery supply and shut down. Now its lodged in your occipital lobe. By the time you get the CT Scan you should already be permanantly blind. There is good news! your migranes should be cured. Also I saved money by switching to Geico.



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