Welcome back to Beyond the Patterns.

Today I have the huge pleasure to announce Sookyung Won.

She is a researcher currently at Caltech and she is interested in nanoscale and microscale

robots.

She is using magnetic nanoparticles and polymers to construct really tiny robots.

They are not just nanoparticles, they really develop locomotion within magnetic fields.

So I think she has super exciting things to show.

I can tell you it's definitely worth watching and I have the huge pleasure that she is here

with her presentation entitled Polymer Composite Engineering for Microrobot Swarm Intelligence.

Sookyung, so glad that you are here and the stage is yours.

Thank you so much, young librarian.

Thank you again for the kind invitation and I also again truly appreciate the opportunity

to present my results today.

Before I introduce my results, I'm going to introduce what is polymers because you do

not usually research where the research area is not a polymer science engineering.

Polymers are basically long-chain molecules composed of the repeating units of the monomers.

Due to these unique structure and physical properties, polymers and their inorganic composites

has a lot of applications from the industry to the flexible electronics, biomedicine and

the soft robotics.

So in this talk, I'm going to introduce my research area on the programming the magnetic

polymer composites for the microrobotism intelligence.

Some intelligence refers to the collective behavior of the multiple agents working together

to achieve the complex task that a single agent cannot do alone.

So in nature, we can see this phenomenon in bird, faeces and swarms.

Inspired by these biological systems, some robotics aim to replicate these self-organism

systems and this approach has a lot of potential in the various applications such as making

wireless networks and navigation and helping in factories and even for the microsurgery

and delivery of the nanomedicine inside the robot in the human body.

Some intelligence has some key components.

The most important thing is the local communication between the agent.

Each agent can interact with the nearby agent and by the local communications, the multiple

agents can work together, organize to adapt in new situation and respond to change in

the environment.

Because of this collective behavior, the agent swarms can complete the task even if some

agent fails to come to the mission completion.

The remaining agents keep working together to finish the mission by the called bird tolerance.

To control the robot, some robots, the microscopic robots typically use the inbuilt sensors inside

the robot body.

However, when the robot size decreases, it became difficult to integrate sensors and

also batteries inside the robot's body.

Instead, these small-scale robots rely on the materials that respond to external stimuli

like light, magnetic field or ultrasound.

Particularly, magnetic robots can be remotely controlled in the micro-scale environment

where manual control is not feasible.

So by adjusting the direction and the magnitude of the applied magnetic field, we can precisely

control the motion and direction of these micro-robot swarms.

This magnetic actuation is basically induced by the magnetization of these magnetic materials

in the robot body.

The magnetic dipole moment within the materials tend to align with the direction of the external

magnetic field.