New York: Researchers have developed a microscopic robot hand, made of silicon and plastic balloons which could help perform surgery and defuse bombs.
The "microhand" is so tiny that when clenched into a fist it measures a little over 1 millimeter across, or roughly as thick as a dime.
It is made using silicon finger bones and balloons for joints that inflate and deflate to flex the fingers, LiveScience reported.
The robot hand was designed by micro electro-mechanical systems scientist Yen-Wen Lu at Rutgers University in Piscataway, and mechanical engineer Chang-Jin Kim at the University of California at Los Angeles.
The prototype has four fingers arranged into a cross, each digit roughly a half-millimeter long, made via conventional semiconductor manufacturing techniques normally used to assemble electronics, the report said.
The microhand is gentle but strong enough to pluck a single delicate fish egg from a sticky egg mass, it added.
"You could imagine this being used for microsurgery at the end of a catheter, for instance. We found we could grab a nerve bundle with it," Kim told LiveScience.
"We are also working with a company who said this could help disarm explosives. Right now the robotic manipulators used there are pretty crude, and a gentle and dexterous hand would be helpful." Lu and Kim reported their findings online October 16 via the journal Applied Physics Letters, he added.
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