Patterned Assembly of Multibiological Robots With Global Input

View at publisher
Authors: Gang Huang, Yuehua Chen, Yinyin Wu, Songlin Zhuang, Mingsi Tong, Huijun Gao
Cited by: 1
References: 45

Abstract

Engineered assembloids fabricated from tissue spheroids hold immense promise for developmental biology, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine. However, fabricating heterogeneous assembloids with precise spatial patterning remains a critical bottleneck, often reliant on manual pipetting that lacks scalability and reproducibility. While magnetic microrobotics, which transforms spheroids into controllable robots, offers a non-invasive alternative, it faces a fundamental challenge: the global input of magnetic actuation. A single command moves all robots simultaneously, leading to coupled motion and frequent assembly failures. Here, we present a collaborative control framework that overcomes this limitation by leveraging local constraints and a novel motion decoupling strategy. We reformulate the high-dimensional, coupled multi-robot planning problem into a low-dimensional aggregate space, effectively transforming the assembly task into a dynamic sequential decision problem. This framework, coupled with a graph-based dynamic path optimization algorithm, enables deterministic, collision-free assembly. Experimental validation demonstrates a 78.57% higher success rate and a 33.20% higher assembly efficiency compared to conventional strategies. This work establishes a foundational engineering principle for assembloid fabrication, transitioning the process from a qualitative experiments to a controllable and programmable engineering discipline, thereby unlocking the potential for deterministic construction of complex biological structures.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Modular Robots and Swarm Intelligence Micro and Nano Robotics Advanced Materials and Mechanics

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Volume
42
Pages
1290–1308
Publication date
1 January 2026