Bacteria Integrated Swimming Microrobots.

A new approach of integrating biological microorganisms such as bacteria to an inorganic robot body for propulsion in low velocity or stagnant flow field is proposed in this paper with the ultimate goal of fabricating a few hundreds of micrometer size swimming robots. To show the feasibility of this approach, Serratia marcescens bacteria are attached to microscale objects such as 10 micron polystyrene beads by blotting them in a bacteria swarm plate. Randomly attached bacteria are shown to propel the beads at an average speed of approximately 15 μm/sec stochastically. Using chemical stimuli, bacteria flagellar propulsion is halted by introducing copper ions into the motility medium of the beads, while ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid is used to resume their motion. Thus, repeatable on/off motion control of the bacteria integrated mobile beads was shown. On-board chemical motion control, steering, wireless communication, sensing, and position detection are few of the future challenges for this work. Small or large numbers of these microrobots can potentially enable hardware platforms for self-organization, swarm intelligence, distributed control, and reconfigurable systems in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]