Gabriel Loke | Bioelectronics at MIT

Magnetic robots walk, crawl, and swim

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

MIT scientists have developed tiny, soft-bodied robots that can be controlled with a weak magnet. The robots, formed from rubbery magnetic spirals, can be programmed to walk, crawl, swim — all in response to a simple, easy-to-apply magnetic field.

“This is the first time this has been done, to be able to control three-dimensional locomotion of robots with a one-dimensional magnetic field,” says Professor Polina Anikeeva, whose team published an open-access paper on the magnetic robots June 3 in the journal Advanced Materials. “And because they are predominantly composed of polymer and polymers are soft, you don’t need a very large magnetic field to activate them. It’s actually a really tiny magnetic field that drives these robots,” adds Anikeeva, who is a professor of materials science and engineering and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a McGovern Institute for Brain Research associate investigator, as well as the associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and director of MIT’s K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center.

The new robots are well suited to transport cargo through confined spaces and their rubber bodies are gentle on fragile environments, opening the possibility that the technology could be developed for biomedical applications. Anikeeva and her team have made their robots millimeters long, but she says the same approach could be used to produce much smaller robots.

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Multifunctional microelectronic fibers enable wireless modulation of gut and brain neural circuits

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Unraveling connections between the brain and gut

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication, relaying signals that help to control feeding and other behaviors. This extensive communication network also influences our mental state and has been implicated in many neurological disorders.

MIT engineers have designed a new technology for probing those connections. Using fibers embedded with a variety of sensors, as well as light sources for optogenetic stimulation, the researchers have shown that they can control neural circuits connecting the gut and the brain, in mice.

In a new study, the researchers demonstrated that they could induce feelings of fullness or reward-seeking behavior in mice by manipulating cells of the intestine. In future work, they hope to explore some of the correlations that have been observed between digestive health and neurological conditions such as autism and Parkinson’s disease.

“The exciting thing here is that we now have technology that can drive gut function and behaviors such as feeding. More importantly, we have the ability to start accessing the crosstalk between the gut and the brain with the millisecond precision of optogenetics, and we can do it in behaving animals,” says Polina Anikeeva, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, director of the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center, associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Anikeeva is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology. The paper’s lead authors are MIT graduate student Atharva Sahasrabudhe, Duke University postdoc Laura Rupprecht, MIT postdoc Sirma Orguc, and former MIT postdoc Tural Khudiyev.

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Magnetically Actuated Fiber‐Based Soft Robots

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Customizing Multifunctional Neural Interfaces through Thermal Drawing Process

Tue, 18 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Selectively Micro-Patternable Fibers via In-Fiber Photolithography

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Scalable Fabrication of Porous Microchannel Nerve Guidance Scaffolds with Complex Geometries

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Flexible fiber-based optoelectronics for neural interfaces

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000