Magnetic ‘muscles’ turn origami into crawling robots that move and heal from within
SMRTR summary
Paper-thin "magnetic muscles" are giving origami robots the power to crawl, climb, and even deliver medicine inside the human body.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a breakthrough 3D printing technique that transforms delicate paper folds into controllable robots. By infusing rubber-like materials with ferromagnetic particles, they've created ultra-thin magnetic films that act as artificial muscles when exposed to magnetic fields.
The team's first creation is a drug-delivery robot built with the Miura-Ori folding pattern. Patients can swallow it as a compact object, then doctors use magnetic fields to guide and unfold it at the target site, where it releases medicine in a controlled manner.
"With this technique, we can print a thin film which we can place directly onto the important parts of the origami robot without reducing its surface area much," says Xiaomeng Fang, the study's lead author.
The researchers also built a crawling robot that moves across surfaces and climbs seven-millimeter obstacles, propelling itself forward one magnetic "step" at a time. The technology could revolutionize minimally invasive healthcare and exploration in harsh environments.
SMRTR provides this summary for quick context. The original article belongs to Interesting Engineering.
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