Written by NASA recently unveiled a prototype for an innovative mission concept called SWIM (Sensing With Independent Micro-swimmers). Developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, this prototype demonstrates the feasibility of deploying a swarm of cellphone-sized, self-propelled robots to explore the icy waters of celestial bodies like Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. The SWIM […]
By applying an electric field, the movement of microswimmers can be manipulated. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization (MPI-DS), the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Hyderabad and the University of Twente, Netherlands, describe the underlying physical principles by comparing experiments and theoretical modeling predictions. They are able to tune the direction […]