CHOBOTIX: Chemical Processing by Swarm Robotics

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CHOBOTIXChemical Processing by Swarm Robotics

• Frantisek Stepanek
• Institute of Chemical Technology
• Prague, Czech Republic

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Project Aims

• - Design and synthesis of chemical robots
• Internally structured particles
• Inspired by microorganisms (but non-living)
• Capable of chemically modifying their
  environment
• Investigation of their collective behaviour
• Applications
• Controlled drug release
• Intelligent cleaning

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Motivation

• Classical robots are intended for
• - performing mechanical tasks
• - in the macroscopic world
• Their function is based on electro-mechanical
  principles

How can we perform chemical tasks on
microscopic scale? - in nature
microorganisms - no equivalent available
- we try to design make one
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Scientific challenges
Proposed architecture of a chemical robot
1) semi-permeable protective outer shell 2)
controlled molecular transport across shell 3)
system of internal compartments/reservoirs 4)
application specific reaction chemistry 5)
adaptive surface properties 6) bottom-up
synthesis, power-up, remote control
10-100 µm
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Current Work

• Stimuli-responsive smart gels
• (J. Cejkova, A. Zadrazil, J. Hanus)
• Structured particle synthesis
• (M. Singh, J. Dohnal, P. Kovacik)
• Liposome synthesis (M. Ullrich)
• Computer-aided design (Z. Grof)
• Reaction chemistry (V. Tokarova, O. Kaspar)

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Societal benefits

• Application areas of chemical robots
• controlled delivery of medicines
• (desired location, amount and time)
• intelligent cleaning
• (neutralisation of contaminants, desinfection)
• harvesting of distributed / diluted resources
• diagnostics / sensing
• energy storage
• New, exciting science!