Micro- and nanorobots swimming in heterogeneous liquids

Essentially all experimental investigations of swimming micro- and nanorobots have focused on swimming in homogeneous Newtonian liquids. In this issue of ACS Nano, Schamel et al. investigate the actuation of "nanopropellers" in a viscoelastic biological gel that illustrates the importance of the size of the nanostructure relative to the gel mesh size. In this Perspective, we shed further light on the swimming performance of larger microrobots swimming in heterogeneous liquids. One of the interesting results of our work is that earlier findings on the swimming performance of motile bacteria in heterogeneous liquids agree, in principle, with our results. We also discuss future research directions that should be pursued in this fascinating interdisciplinary field.