Miniature Robotics and Bioinspired Intelligence for Better Health

Miniature robots and systems have attracted extensive interest in biomedical engineering owing to their great potentials to work inside the body for diagnosis, drug delivery, minimally invasive surgery, and so on. This talk will briefly introduce the state-of-art of small robotics for biomedical applications and then focus on the existing challenges, the efforts we have been taking, and future opportunities. To adapt to the harsh environment inside the human body, we proposed a multi-legged soft millirobot actuated by the magnetic field, which yields superior adaptivity to both dry and wet environments with ultrafast locomotion speed, ultra-strong carrying capacity, and excellent obstacle crossing ability. By integrating it with energy material or biocompatible material, such a robot could bring intriguing opportunities for environment sensing and controllable drug delivery in the digestive tract. Further, to pursue the deeply human-robot-environment interaction, we also developed some materials, sensors and structures inspired by the intelligent behavior/function of nature livings, which will be introduced in the second part of this talk. At the end, I would like to share my own perspective on robotics, intelligence and biomedical engineering, and discuss with the audiences.