Bone-forming biohybrid materials for soft robotics

Nature uses fascinating means to create organisms, from single cell bacteria to complex animals, all created autonomously. Human-made devices, e.g. robots are made using tools by engineers, following specified plans.

I want to go beyond current robotics and develop devices that create themselves: microrobots that are imprinted with instructions, bio-cues, to create their own components, like in nature where a single cell contains all the genetic code to build a complete organism.

To achieve this, I will develop novel bio-hybrid materials and utilize those to make soft bionic microrobots that create themselves.

After fabrication, the microrobots will be like larvae and thereafter develop into full microrobots by creating their own bones, joints, and muscles. Morphological changes will give the robot its 3D structure.

The skeletal structure will be induced by mineralisation like in vivo bone formation, using new bio-hybrid materials based on hydrogels and bone forming plasma membrane nanofragments.

Next, using additive manufacturing and microfabrication, we will construct a microrobot that will grow its own components, i.e. skeleton and muscles. Initially the robot will be in the centimetre-scale, but thereafter reduced to the millimetre scale.

These microrobots can be employed for environmental monitoring or as injectable or swallowable medical devices for drug delivery or microsurgery. The bio-hybrid materials can be used in tissue engineering, medical devices and implants.