Directed Propulsion, Chemotaxis and Clustering in Propelled Microparticles

With numerous reports of creating propulsion in synthetic microsized particles, the next goal of this research field is to control the direction of propulsion so that it can be used to perform useful tasks. This mini-review summarizes the current state of this research including directing propulsion of microparticles using externally applied (e.g. electric) or naturally occurring fields (e.g. gravity), migration due to a chemical gradient (chemotaxis), and organization of particles’ position relative to other particles (clustering).