Mobile Microrobotic Cleaner In Microfluidics

Miniaturized mobile microrobots have opened new applications from biomedical to environmental fields. Among various types of microrobots, recent progress on highly performing planar type microrobots could offer a good compromise between the manufacturability and the functionality promising for practical applications. The remaining challenges are to guarantee their sustainable operations in unclean and wet environments where most of microrobots could suffer from being immobilized due to the increased risk of surface stiction. Our proposed microrobots made of thin-film metal layers with open surface are able to enhance the robustness of propulsion and manipulation thanks to the multiple modes of propulsion and manipulation which can serve as a fail-safe solution in uncontrolled environments. We successfully demonstrated that they are able to navigate in unclean environments and able to clean the environments with manipulation functionalities. This will no doubt be able to open various other applications which need similar level of the performance. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.