Qing Shi

• PhD
• Professor at Beijing Institute of Technology

Micromanipulation is crucial for operating and analyzing microobjects in advanced biomedical applications. However, safe, low-cost, multifunctional micromanipulation for operating bio-objects across scales and modalities remains inaccessible. Here, we propose a versatile micromanipulation method driven by acoustic gas-liquid-solid interactions, nam...

Bio‐integrated microrobots (BIMs), which are fabricated with biofriendly materials, biological units (e.g. cells or biomolecules), or cell‐material hybrids have emerged as a promising technology for minimally invasive biomedicine. The diminutive size and flexible structures enable BIMs to navigate within narrow, deep, and challenging‐to‐reach in vi...

Magnetic miniature robots have shown great potential in biomedical applications in recent years. However, a challenge remains in which it is difficult for magnetic miniature robots to achieve balanced capabilities for multimodal locomotion and fluidic manipulation in various environments. Here, we report a magnetic shaftless propeller-like millirob...

Digital microfluidic chips (DMCs) have shown huge potential for biochemical analysis applications due to their excellent droplet manipulation capabilities. The driving force is a critical factor for characterizing and optimizing the performance of droplet manipulation. Conducting numerical analysis of the driving force is essential for DMC design,...

Owing to their high task efficiency and load capacity in closed space operations, multiple millirobots system has drawn extensive attention recently. However, the limited global magnetic fields and nonlinear interactions between individual robots make it challenging to control multiple millirobots in close proximity to each other, resulting in diff...

Microfluidic bioprinter demonstrates significant advantage in controlling the generation of hydrogel microfibers as bioinks, however, precisely controlling the deposition position of the resulting microfibers remains c hallenging, since a lag is always generated in microfluidic jets, inducing spatial deviation between the laydown pattern of the mic...

Soft millirobots are highly promising for biomedical applications due to their reconfigurability and multifunctionality within physiological environments. However, the diverse and narrow biological cavity environments pose significant adaptability challenges for these millirobots. Here, we present a dual-morphology, thin-film millirobot equipped wi...

Magnetic helical microrobots have attracted considerable attraction in microscale targeted delivery due to their high propulsion efficiency and movement flexibility. However, for biomedical applications in unstructured and multibranched liquid environments, the capabilities of high swimming performance and precise selective control over a robot gro...

Robots, integrated into biological systems as sociable partners, offer promising advancement in the mechanistic understanding of social behaviours. These biohybrid systems bring controllability to help elucidate the underlying biological intelligence previously inaccessible through traditional techniques. However, state-of-the-art interactive robot...

Manipulating heterogeneous microtargets based on optoelectronic tweezers (OETs) to construct micropatterns with specific distribution and ordered arrangement enables recapitulating the spatial architecture of cells in native tissues, and has significant potential in tissue regeneration, medical diagnostics, and cell behavior research. However, the...

Digital microfluidic chips (DMCs) have shown the ability to flexibly manipulate droplets and particles, which is meaningful for biomedical applications in drug screening and clinical diagnostics. As a critical component of DMCs, the dielectric layer, with its key physical parameters (permittivity and thickness), directly determines the voltage dist...

Hydrogel‐based 3D cell cultures are extensively utilized to create biomimetic cellular microstructures. However, there is still lack of effective method for both evaluation of the complex interaction of cells with hydrogel and the functionality of the resulting micro‐structures. This limitation impedes the further application of these microstructur...

Biologically inspired jumping robots exhibit exceptional movement capabilities and can quickly overcome obstacles. However, the stability and accuracy of jumping movements are significantly compromised by rapid changes in posture. Here, we propose a stable jumping control algorithm for a locust-inspired jumping robot based on deep reinforcement lea...

Uniformly distributed fluid shear stress can promote axonal growth, aiding in the efficient construction of functional neural interfaces. However, challenges remain in the construction of the micro-scale environment with a uniform fluidic stress distribution. In this study, we designed and fabricated a microfluidic chip with arched-section microflu...

Engineered microstructures that mimic in vivo tissues have demonstrated great potential for applications in regenerative medicine, drug screening, and cell behavior exploration. However, current methods for engineering microstructures that mimic the multi-extracellular matrix and multicellular features of natural tissues to realize tissue-mimicking...

Micron-range untethered, magnetic helical robots have great potential for biomedical applications due to their desirable performance with high flexibility and accuracy in unstructured and confined environments. However, at the microscale, time-varying uncertain disturbances in the environment and electromagnetic system greatly hinder helical micror...

Large quadruped robots have shown potential for a wide range of everyday tasks due to their superior terrain adaptation. However, small-scale quadruped robots have limited payloads and thus cannot carry sufficient sensing and computational resources, which imposes limitations on their environmental adaptability. To address this challenge, we propos...

In order to solve the problem of stable jumping of micro robot, we design a special mechanism: elastic passive joint (EPJ). EPJ can assist in achieving smooth jumping through the opening-closing process when the robot jumps. First, we introduce the composition and operation principle of EPJ, and perform a dynamic modeling of the robot's jumping pro...

Microfluidic chips offer high customizability and excellent biocompatibility, holding important promise for the precise control of biological growth at the microscale. However, the microfluidic chips employed in the studies of regulating cell growth are typically fabricated through 2D photolithography. This approach partially restricts the diversit...

Flexible miniature robots are expected to enter difficult-to-reach areas in vivo to carry out targeted operations, attracting widespread attention. However, it is challenging for the existing soft miniature robots to substantially alter their stable shape once the structure is designed. This limitation leads to a fixed motion mode, which subsequent...

Magnetic helical microrobots have great potential in biomedical applications due to their ability to access confined and enclosed environments via remote manipulation by magnetic fields. However, achieving collision-free navigation for microrobots in complex and unstructured environments, particularly in highly dynamic settings, remains a challenge...

Locusts have various motion modes among which they continuously switch in terrestrial and aerial domains, hence achieving high environmental adaptability. Several robots have been developed to mimic the jump-gliding locomotion of locusts, but their mobility and transitional stability are limited because of structural and control limitations at a sm...

Deciphering how different types of behavior and ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) of rats interact can yield insights into the neural basis of social interaction. However, the behavior-vocalization interplay of rats remains elusive because of the challenges of relating the two communication media in complex social contexts. Here, we propose a machine...

Embodying in vitro biological neural networks (BNNs) with robots to explore the rise of intelligence in these simpler models and to endow robots with biological intelligence has been attracting increasing attention in the fields of neuroscience and robotics. However, current research suffers from unstable sensory-motor mapping due to the random w...

Jumping is a key locomotion for miniature robots, but it is difficult for a robot to jump a long distance without flipping. To solve this problem, we develop a miniature locust-inspired jumping robot, which has a body length of 10 cm and weight of 60 g. On the basis of the extracted skeletal muscle movement of a locust, we make full use of the Step...

Variety of microfibers have been widely utilized as a promising bioink for 3D bioprinting. However, the mechanical properties of the cell-laden microfiber are difficult to be characterized precisely due to the lack of low-damage loading methods for encapsulated cells that require a relatively short loading time. In this paper, we propose a bulking-...

For decades, it has been difficult for small-scale legged robots to conquer challenging environments. To solve this problem, we propose the introduction of a bioinspired soft spine into a small-scale legged robot. By capturing the motion mechanism of rat erector spinae muscles and vertebrae, we designed a cable-driven centrally symmetric soft spine...

In this paper, we propose a novel method for emulating rat-like behavioral interactions in robots using reinforcement learning. Specifically, we develop a state decision method to optimize the interaction process among 6 known behavior types that have been identified in previous research on rat interactions. The novelty of our method lies in using...

Microfluidic printing provides a novel tool to facilitate the bulk assembly of cell-aligned microfibers for the fabrication of artificial skeletal muscle structure. However, due to the poor controllability for the deposition position of the microfiber, it is still difficult to realize the anisotropic assembly. In this paper, we developed a magnetic...

Microcontact printing (μCP) is widely used in neuroscience research. However, μCP yields reduced cell-substrate adhesion compared with directly coating cell adhesion molecules. Here, we demonstrate that the reduced cell-substrate adhesion caused by μCP, high seeding density, and the local restriction would separately contribute to more aggregated (...

In vitro biological neural networks (BNNs) interconnected with robots, so-called BNN-based neurorobotic systems, can interact with the external world, so that they can present some preliminary intelligent behaviors, including learning, memory, robot control, etc. This work aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the intelligent behaviors presen...

Contact micromanipulations are mostly based on multirobot coordinated operations for specific tasks and targets. However, micromanipulations involve a highly orchestrated set of tasks requiring an uncertain range of flexibilities and dimensions. Therefore, coordination strategies enabling multirobots to dynamically adapt to complex tasks are still...

Magnetic helical microrobots have attracted considerable attention in navigation control. However, the performance of microrobots is negatively affected by time-varying uncertain perturbations and obstacles, at the microscale. In this study, we present a navigation control scheme for accurately guiding the helical microrobot to targeted positions i...

Engineered extracellular matrices (ECMs) that replicate complex in-vivo features have shown great potential in tissue engineering. Biocompatible hydrogel microstructures have been widely used to replace these native ECMs for physiologically relevant research. However, accurate reproduction of the 3D hierarchical and nonuniform mechanical stiffness...

In this article, we present a rat-inspired whisker sensor for a biomimetic robotic rat and demonstrate its superior tactile perception performance. In particular, the design, fabrication, modeling, and experimental characterization are presented. The sensor is fabricated using silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. Moreover, by modeling the whisker...

With high throughput and high flexibility, optoelectronic tweezers (OETs) hold huge potential for massively parallel micromanipulation. However, the trajectory of the virtual electrode has been planned in advance in most synchronous manipulations for multiple targets based on an optically induced dielectrophoresis (ODEP) mechanism, which is insuffi...

Legged robots are very promising for use in real-world applications, but their operation in narrow spaces is still challenging. One solution for enhancing their environmental adaptability is to design a small-sized biomimetic robot capable of performing multiple motions. By capturing a decent representation of an actual rat ( rattus norvegicus ),...

Whiskers of some animals, such as rats and cats, can actively sense stimuli from their surrounding environment. Such a capability is attractive for intelligent mobile robots. However, an artificial whisker with similar abilities has not been fully developed so that the robots acquire their surrounding environment information in an active approach s...

Pressure sensors are indispensable in wearable equipment, human-machine interfaces, and robotics. However, facile and rapid fabrication of stretch-flexible pressure sensors with good performance is still needed. In this paper, a fast-response pressure sensor used for tactile sensing on a nonplanar surface was prototyped in an effortless manner on t...

Magnetically controlled microrobots have attracted wide attention in noninvasive therapy. However, it is challenging to design a microrobot with both low motion resistance and multi-mode motions control. Here, we design a 100 μm helical drill-like microrobot with biodegradable materials GelMA and HAMA. The microrobot is optimized with surface pores...

In this letter, we propose a motion generation strategy using imitation learning (IL) for biomimetic robots to interact with animals in a more natural manner. We previously developed a bioinspired spine mechanism allowing the robot to mimic rat motion closely. Thanks to the spine morphology, we established the corresponding relationship of motion v...

Viscoelastic hydrogel microfibers have extensive applications in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, however, their viscoelasticity is still difficult to be directly characterized because microfiber-specific measuring system is lacking for quantitative studies. In this paper, we develop a two-probe micro-stretching system to quantitativel...

Existing biomimetic robots can perform some basic rat-like movement primitives (MPs) and simple behavior with stiff combinations of these MPs. To mimic typical rat behavior with high similarity, we propose parameterizing the behavior using a probabilistic model and movement characteristics. First, an analysis of fifteen 10-min video sequences revea...

In cloning, clinical in vitro fertilization, gene research, and stem cell research, enucleation or injection of the individual cell is essential. Three-dimensional (3-D) orientation control of the target cell could significantly influence the operation success rate, which is still one of the main challenges in conventional micromanipulation. In thi...

Collagen provides a promising environment for 3D nerve cell culture; however, the function of perfusion culture and cell-growth guidance is difficult to integrate into such an environment to promote cell growth. In this paper, we develop a bio-inspired design method for constructing a perfusion culture platform for guided nerve cell growth and diff...

Nanointerconnection has been selected as a promising method in the post-Moore era to realize device miniaturization and integration. Even with many advances, the existing nanojoining methods still need further developments to meet the three-dimensional nanostructure construction requirements of the next-generation devices. Here, we proposed an effi...

Magnetically controlled microrobots have attracted wide attention in noninvasive therapy. However, it is challenging to design a microrobot with low swimming drag force whose swimming step-out frequency can be dynamically adjusted. Here, we design a 75- μ m helical drill-like microrobot with the biodegradable materials gelatin methacryloyl and hya...

Microrobotic contact manipulation enables automated and precise cell capture, positioning and screening and has potential in biomedical engineering and disease detection. However, when using an optical microscope for visual positioning of targets, the poor clarity, limited cell-background contrast and lack of global 3D information of the cells in t...

Dynamic DNA origami nanostructures that respond to external stimuli are promising platforms for cargo delivery and nanoscale sensing. However, the low stability of such nanostructures under physiological conditions presents a major obstacle for their use in biomedical applications. This article describes a stable tetrahedral DNA nanorobot (TDN) pro...

Engineered three-dimensional (3D) tissues that replicate composite in-vivo architectures have shown great potential for use in biomedical research. Cell-encapsulated hydrogel micro-scaffolds have been applied widely as basic building blocks to construct these artificial tissues. However, accurate reproduction of heterogeneous hierarchical structure...

Tactile perception using whisker sensor is widely applied to robots under dark and narrow environments. However, most of the existing whisker sensors are relatively large. Meanwhile, most experiments of texture classification using whisker sensors are carried under relatively constrained conditions. In this paper, we developed an ultra-small whiske...

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21986-8

Shape-morphing uses a single actuation source for complex-task-oriented multiple patterns generation, showing a more promising way than reconfiguration, especially for microrobots, where multiple actuators are typically hardly available. Environmental stimuli can induce additional causes of shape transformation to compensate the insufficient space...

For a small-sized biomimetic robot, it is challenging to mimic animal-like motion with high speed and high flexibility. To enable high flexibility, high stability, and high biomimicry degree for the robotic rat, we drew inspirations from three agile rat movements, namely, the pitch, yaw, and U-turn movements. First, we proposed key movement joints...

Circumferential alignment of vasucalr smooth muscle cells (vSMCs) is critical to form an in vivo-like vasucalr smooth muscle layer in vitro. Although many techniques to elicit such alignment on 3D substrates have been demonstrated, it remains a challenge to recapitulate the circumferential cellular alignment of vascular smooth muscle tissues in 3D...

Engineered three-dimensional (3D) microtissues that recapitulate in vivo tissue morphology and microvessel lumens have shown significant potential in drug screening and regenerative medicine. Although microfluidic-based techniques have been developed for bottom-up assembly of 3D tissue models, the spatial organization of heterogeneous micromodules...

Low concentrations of gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) microfibers are more favorable for cellular activity compared with high concentrations. However, applying low-concentration GelMA microfibers as building blocks for higher-order cellular assembly remains challenging owing to their poor mechanical properties. Herein, we report a new template-based m...

Social interaction between a robot and rats is important since the robot can generate reproducible social behaviors across trials. However, lacking internal state feedback from the rat makes current robot-rat interaction a very preliminary level comparing with rat-rat interaction. Previous biological studies showed that ultrasonic vocalizations (US...

Magnetic microrobots have been developed for various biomedical applications. Magnetic motion on substrate surface is required for indirect magnetic manipulation and assembly of non-magnetic targets, where the drag force and friction force presents as the main resistance for actuation. Inspired by human walking, a novel magnetic microrobot with two...