Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Cornell University fabricate cell-sized origami robots by an ALD & graphene nanotechnology

Cornell University reports that one of their researcher teams has made a robot exoskeleton that can rapidly change its shape upon sensing chemical or thermal changes in its environment. And, they claim, these microscale machines – equipped with electronic, photonic and chemical payloads – could become a powerful platform for robotics at the size scale of biological microorganisms. Their work is outlined in “Graphene-based Bimorphs for Micron-sized, Autonomous Origami Machines,” published Jan. 2 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Miskin is lead author; other contributors included David Muller, the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Engineering, and doctoral students Kyle Dorsey, Baris Bircan and Yimo Han. [Graphene-based bimorphs for micron-sized, autonomous origami machines. Marc Z. Miskin et al (2018), PNAS https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1712889115 ]

Please check out this interview video for more amazing details - some snapshots are given below in  the form of screen dumps from vimeo [LINK]
 
 
 
The bimorph is built using atomic layer deposition of atomically thin layers (2 nm) of silicon dioxide onto aluminum over a cover slip – then wet-transferring a single atomic layer of graphene on top of the stack. The result is the thinnest bimorph ever made. [Vimeo Screen dump]
 

Processing has been taken place in Cornell University Clean room - Cornell NanoScale Facility for Science and Technology, here showing the ALD reactor and rpocessing of the SiO2 layer (Oxford Instruments, FlexAl) [Vimeo Screen dump]


The researchers can fabricate many different forms of origami shapes ranging from simple tetrahedrons to cubes and helix shaped objects [Vimeo Screen dump]
 

 
With this new amazing technology, the Cornell rersearchers are developing robotic ‘exoskeleton’ for electronics with integrated microchips. [Vimeo Screen dump]
 
 
 

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