Wyatt Shields receives Army Young Investigator Award to advance programmable microrobots
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Â鶹Ãâ·Ñ°æÏÂÔØBoulder Associate Professor C. Wyatt Shields IV (Chemical and Biological Engineering) has received the Army Research Office's Young Investigator award to advance a new generation of programmable microscopic robots.
Shields' team is developing tiny magnetic building blocks that self-assemble into microrobots with programmed movements and functions. By changing the sequence of individual particles, researchers can control how the structures behave, creating microscale systems designed to perform specific tasks.
The research builds on Shields' broader bioengineering work, with applications including targeted drug delivery, cell therapy, biological cargo transport and biosensing. The new platform could help expand the capabilities of these systems by enabling increasingly complex and programmable behaviors at the microscale.