Improvement of the Biomolecular Artificial Muscle in Mechanical Properties and Three-dimensional Application

Molecular motors are a promising research direction, offering advantages such as self-organization, scalability, and energy transfer efficiency, which significantly promote advancements in the field of microrobots. This research aims to enhance the properties of biomolecular artificial muscles and address the inherent limitations they face. Firstly, the improvement is focused on the contraction motion of the biomolecular artificial muscles. We hypothesize that microtubules play a crucial role in the function of biomolecular artificial muscles and expect that external force fields, such as fluid flow fields, can influence and control the alignment of microtubules, thereby enhancing force generation. Preliminary results have shown that the mean velocity and orientation of microtubules can indeed be affected and controlled by the fluid flow field which basically proved the possibility of the assumption. Additionally, exploring the application of biomolecular artificial muscle is also a vital task for us. Currently, biomolecular artificial muscles have been validated but also restricted for planar contraction motion, which limits the further utilizations of micromanipulation. To achieve motility not only on the x-y axis but also in the z direction, a specific experimental setup has been demonstrated that the micro gripper prototyped and integrated with the microstructures is designed and proposed for this purpose. The biomolecular artificial muscle would be chosen as the activated source of the microgripper and predicted to achieve the aspiration of three-dimensional micromanipulation.