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Dear Colleagues,

The 1966 movie “Fantastic Voyage” captured the world’s imagination by portraying a microscopic submarine navigating through the human bloodstream to repair blood clots and ultimately save a life. This adventure is not yet on the horizon in 2020, but it inspired rapid development in science and technology to build micro/nanoscale machines and robots to emulate these types of Hollywood sci-fi fantasies. In the past decade, advances in the design, fabrication, actuation, imaging, and navigation of micro/nanorobots have greatly enhanced their power, function, and versatility towards in vivo applications for improved diagnostics and therapies. Micro/nanorobotics is becoming the most emerging and promising field in robotics by providing the unprecedented capacity to precisely interact with biology.

In this special issue, we seek papers on all kinds of micro/nanorobotics from new materials, novel actuation mechanism, fabrication methods, modeling and computation, imaging and navigation methods, to diverse applications. Both original research papers, and review articles are welcome.

Dr. Jinxing Li
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Micromachines is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

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Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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11 pages, 20589 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Surface Tension-Based Alignment of Microfibers on Hydrophilic–Superhydrophobic Grooved Surfaces

by Bo Chang, Jialong Jin and Quan Zhou

Micromachines 2020, 11(11), 973; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/mi11110973 - 29 Oct 2020

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 2270

Abstract

Alignment and orderly distribution of microfibers have a major effect on the mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties of the fiber reinforced materials, biomimetic materials, and soft microsensors. However, it is still a challenging task to precisely align and distribute microfibers and construct complex patterns. This paper proposes a surface tension-based method to align and orderly distribute microfibers. A model was developed to simulate the surface tension driven alignment of the microfiber. We designed and fabricated hydrophilic–superhydrophobic grooved surfaces. We demonstrated that the microfibers can self-align to the hydrophilic–superhydrophobic grooves with different geometries. We studied the influence of the volume of the droplet and bias on the alignment success rate. The results indicate that the process can tolerate large variations of the bias and the volume, unless the volume is not enough to cover the groove. We further investigated the influence of the width of the groove on the alignment accuracy. The results show that the alignment accuracy is largely depending on the size difference between the groove and the microfiber; the better the size of the groove matches the size of the fiber, the higher the alignment accuracy will be achieved. The proposed method has great potential in construction of complex microstructures using microfibers. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Progress on Micro/Nano Robots and Their applications)

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Review

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22 pages, 2398 KiB

Open AccessReview

The Energy Conversion behind Micro-and Nanomotors

by Yingmeng Wang, Yingfeng Tu and Fei Peng

Micromachines 2021, 12(2), 222; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/mi12020222 - 22 Feb 2021

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 3921

Abstract

Inspired by the autonomously moving organisms in nature, artificially synthesized micro-nano-scale power devices, also called micro-and nanomotors, are proposed. These micro-and nanomotors that can self-propel have been used for biological sensing, environmental remediation, and targeted drug transportation. In this article, we will systematically overview the conversion of chemical energy or other forms of energy in the external environment (such as electrical energy, light energy, magnetic energy, and ultrasound) into kinetic mechanical energy by micro-and nanomotors. The development and progress of these energy conversion mechanisms in the past ten years are reviewed, and the broad application prospects of micro-and nanomotors in energy conversion are provided. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Recent Progress on Micro/Nano Robots and Their applications)

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