Breaking the wall of large and heavy robots

Miniature robots have the potential to change the paradigm in multiple fields, and the collaboration of a large number of miniature robots in operation at macrostructures is a long-term dream in the engineering and scientific community. One of the future applications will be the in-vitro manipulation of living organisms, in-vivo drug delivery and minimally invasive surgery, massively parallel production processes or waste separation. Therefore the systems using tiny cooperative robots are the subject of numerous research studies due to their potential for applications with high impact on many fields [1]. The state-of-the-art milli/micro-robotic systems adopting magnetically actuated ferromagnetic bodies have become a fast-advancing technological field, and several ground-breaking results have been recently published. Let us mention magnetic soft-bodied robots [2], magnetic robot swarms [3], magnetic mini-robots operated microfluidic systems [4] or magnetically navigated liquid robots. The primary goal of the lecture will be to discuss the major challenges in the field of magnetically guided multiscale actuation. The topic will be set into broader perspectives with functional materials research, additive manufacturing processes and machine learning algorithms, followed by the results of the proof-of-concept research in magnetic insect-scale robots and magnetic soft robots.