想像一群大小犹如发丝的微型机器人,游动在你的血管里并修复损失,或者飞驰在电脑芯片中充当安全锁,或者使心脏组织快速愈合。来自加州大学伯克利分校、达特茅斯学院和杜克大学的研究人员们,展示了如何利用单一电信号来指挥一群微型机器人自动组装成为更大的结构。研究者们希望用这种方法来建造生物组织。但要让微型机器人做类似的事,研究人员首先要找到一个控制它们的好方法。“当物体很小时,它们就容易粘在一起,”一名美国国家标准技术研究院(NIST)智能系统部门的机器人研究者杰森·戈尔曼(Jason Gorman)说。NIST合作组织了一项微型机器人的年度竞赛,吸引了来自世界各地的众多组织团体。“已被发明的多种移动方法都着眼于克服或利用这一特性。” Imagine a group of tiny, robotic, robotic robots that swim in your veins and repair the damage, or speeding to act as a security lock in a computer chip or to quickly heal heart tissue. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College and Duke University show how using a single electrical signal can direct a group of micro-robots to be automatically assembled into larger structures. Researchers hope to use this method to build biological tissue. But to make micro-robots do something similar, researchers first have to find a good way to control them. “They stick together when things are small,” said Jason Gorman, a robotics researcher with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Intelligent Systems Division. NIST co-organized an annual contest of micro-robots that attracted a large number of organizational groups from around the world. “A variety of movement methods have been invented that aim to overcome or exploit this feature. ”