Robot Cleaners

You might have seen the small, circular robotic vacuum cleaners that can autonomously clean your house. While you’re out, they methodically whiz around your living room, sucking up unwanted dirt and debris. What if the same could be done for hard-to-reach parts of your body, or essential medical equipment? Researchers have developed micro-robots that can swarm together to remove biofilms – stubborn mats of bacteria stuck onto surfaces – from equipment like catheters and even human teeth. The nanobots, pictured cleaning a circle from a biofilm-covered surface, could potentially be steered by magnetic fields to remove tricky growths on teeth, saving patients from the unpleasant experience of having a dentist fishing around their mouth, or sterilise contaminated equipment – a particularly promising idea as staving off antibiotic-resistant bacteria in medical settings becomes ever-more important.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Video from work by Geelsu Hwang and Amauri J. Paula, and colleagues
• University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA
• Video used with permission from the AAAS - the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• Published in Science Robotics, April 2019