Most people have come to accept that we’re going to be seeing a lot more of robots in the near future. And now that researchers have a way of mass producing tiny, cell-sized robots, we could be seeing more of them a lot quicker.

These little machines have been named “syncells” by the MIT team that invented them. They’re microscopic devices that may eventually be used in a variety of situations including being used within the bloodstream to seek out disease or to monitor the conditions within a gas or oil pipeline.





The way in which the researchers are able to develop the tiny devices in such large quantities is down to the way the method controls the natural fracturing process of thin and fragile materials. In doing this, the fracture lines are directed in such a way that they produce little pockets of an easily predictable shape and size. Embedded within these pockets are tiny circuits that gather, record, and output quantitative data. The whole process is called autoperforation.

Using graphene to form the outer structure of the syncell, the researchers managed to create a system that controls the fracturing process to produce pieces that are all the same size and shape. “What we discovered is that you can impose a strain field to cause the fracture to be guided, and you can use that for controlled fabrication,” says one of the authors of the paper describing the process, Michael Strano, a professor at MIT.

When the graphene is placed over the array of polymer dots (the place where all the electronics for the robot are contained), lines of high strain form around the corners, and as a result, fractures become concentrated in these areas. But then, “something pretty amazing happens”, says Strano. The graphene fractures completely, but that fracture is neatly guided around the pillar producing a clean cut round piece of graphene.





In the setup, there are two layers of graphene – one above the polymer dots, and one below. This helps the pocket to form and the polymer to become sealed inside. In terms of size, the robots range from around 10 micrometers across, to about 10 times that. In terms of behavior, they act very much like a normal cell and look very similar to one, even under a microscope.

Manufacturing robots this way is a huge breakthrough and shows great potential for being used in both the industrial and biomedical world. “This general procedure of using controlled fracture as a production method can be extended across many length scales,” says graduate student Albert Liu, another author of the paper published in the journal Nature Materials. “It could potentially be used with essentially any 2-D materials of choice, in principle allowing future researchers to tailor these atomically thin surfaces into any desired shape or form for applications in other disciplines.”

To demonstrate their method, the team wrote the letters MIT into a syncell’s memory array. This is where information is stored as varying levels of conductivity and is read using an electrical probe. It also has the ability to store the data without using any power, enabling information to be gathered at a later date.





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