Progress to human cell sized transforming robots made from atomically thin paper

Microscale machines – equipped with electronic, photonic and chemical payloads – could become a powerful platform for robotics at the size scale of biological microorganisms.

* prototypes three times larger than a red blood cell have been made
* they are working on the microscale actuator muscles

Above – Graphene-glass bimorphs can be used to fabricate numerous micron-scale 3-D structures, including (top to bottom) tetrahedron, helices of controllable pitch, high-angle folds and clasps, basic origami motifs with bidirectional folding, and boxes. Credit: Marc Miskin, Cornell University

The machines move using a motor called a bimorph. A bimorph is an assembly of two materials – in this case, graphene and glass – that bends when driven by a stimulus like heat, a chemical reaction or an applied voltage. The shape change happens because, in the case of heat, two materials with different thermal responses expand by different amounts over the same temperature change.

As a consequence, the bimorph bends to relieve some of this strain, allowing one layer to stretch out longer than the other. By adding rigid flat panels that cannot be bent by bimorphs, the researchers localize bending to take place only in specific places, creating folds. With this concept, they are able to make a variety of folding structures ranging from tetrahedra (triangular pyramids) to cubes.

In the case of graphene and glass, the bimorphs also fold in response to chemical stimuli by driving large ions into the glass, causing it to expand. Typically this chemical activity only occurs on the very outer edge of glass when submerged in water or some other ionic fluid. Since their bimorph is only a few nanometers thick, the glass is basically all outer edge and very reactive.

“It’s a neat trick,” Miskin said, “because it’s something you can do only with these nanoscale systems.”

The bimorph is built using atomic layer deposition – chemically “painting” atomically thin layers 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.

One of their machines was described as being “three times larger than a red blood cell and three times smaller than a large neuron” when folded. Folding scaffolds of this size have been built before, but this group’s version has one clear advantage.

“Our devices are compatible with semiconductor manufacturing,” Cohen said. “That’s what’s making this compatible with our future vision for robotics at this scale.”

And due to graphene’s relative strength, Miskin said, it can handle the types of loads necessary for electronics applications.

“If you want to build this electronics exoskeleton,” he said, “you need it to be able to produce enough force to carry the electronics. Ours does that.”

For now, these tiniest of tiny machines have no commercial application in electronics, biological sensing or anything else. But the research pushes the science of nanoscale robots forward, McEuen said.

“Right now, there are no ‘muscles’ for small-scale machines,” he said, “so we’re building the small-scale muscles.”

PNAS – Graphene-based bimorphs for micron-sized, autonomous origami machines

5 pages of supporting information.

Significance

Cornell researchers built origami machines the size of cells by folding them out of atomically thin paper. At the heart of their approach is an actuator technology made from graphene and a nanometer-thick layer of glass. They use these actuators to fold 2D patterns into targeted 3D structures. The resulting machines are freely deployed in solutions, can change shape in fractions of a second, carry loads large enough to support embedded electronics, and can be fabricated en masse. This work opens the door to a generation of small machines for sensing, robotics, energy harvesting, and interacting with biological systems on the cellular level.

Abstract
Origami-inspired fabrication presents an attractive platform for miniaturizing machines: thinner layers of folding material lead to smaller devices, provided that key functional aspects, such as conductivity, stiffness, and flexibility, are persevered. Here, we show origami fabrication at its ultimate limit by using 2D atomic membranes as a folding material. As a prototype, we bond graphene sheets to nanometer-thick layers of glass to make ultrathin bimorph actuators that bend to micrometer radii of curvature in response to small strain differentials. These strains are two orders of magnitude lower than the fracture threshold for the device, thus maintaining conductivity across the structure. By patterning 2-𝝁𝝁m-thick rigid panels on top of bimorphs, we localize bending to the unpatterned regions to produce folds. Although the graphene bimorphs are only nanometers thick, they can lift these panels, the weight equivalent of a 500-nm-thick silicon chip. Using panels and bimorphs, we can scale down existing origami patterns to produce a wide range of machines. These machines change shape in fractions of a second when crossing a tunable pH threshold, showing that they sense their environments, respond, and perform useful functions on time and length scales comparable with microscale biological organisms. With the incorporation of electronic, photonic, and chemical payloads, these basic elements will become a powerful platform for robotics at the micrometer scale.