Biography

Tianyun Huang received the Ph.D. degree from the Dalian University of Technology in 2015, majoring in control theory and control engineering to study swarm controls and intelligence of multi-agent robotic systems. After that, as a postdoctoral fellow, he joined the State Key Laboratory for Turbulence and Complex Systems, College of Engineering, at Peking University. During this period, he independently established an integrated experimental platform for design, fabrication, characterization, actuation, and control of smart devices at micro- and nano-scales. He also supervised several Ph.D. students as a project leader of the Young Scholars Program (Controllable Deformation and Flow Characteristics of Flexible Functionalized Micro/Nano-devices) and as a major participant of the General Program and Key Program, which is supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China. Currently, Dr.Huang is a postdoctoral researcher in the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, at ETH Zurich, working on investigating intelligent micromachines for minimally invasive medicine. Since 2011, he has more than 30 SCI or EI papers, including Nature, Materials Today, Advanced Materials, Applied Physics Letters, etc.

Abstract

Untethered, miniaturized robotic devices enable us to perform minimally invasive operations precisely in complex 3D microenvironments. In recent years, a variety of simple micromachines have been developed including microstructures controlled by oscillating magnetic fields, helical swimmers demonstrating corkscrew motion, thermally or magnetically actuated microgrippers, self‐propelled micromotors, and electrostatic impact‐driven microactuators. However, mircorobots, which were tiny, weak, fragile and harmful in-vivo, have to be created into more adaptations and bits of intelligence, as well as under some delivery assistances as a variety of significant challenges towards real applications come out. It is highly conceivable that the applications will be achieved with the development of intelligent micromachines that are autonomous, multifunctional, self-adaptive, re-configurable, or even re-programmable, etc.