Scientists were able to create an army of small, walking robots in a new breakthrough.
The objects are the first microscopic robots made of semiconductor components. This allows them to be controlled and forced to deal with standard electronic signals, allowing them to be integrated into more traditional circles.
The researchers behind the discovery now hope they can be built into even more complex versions. That would allow future robots to be controlled by computer chips, mass-produced – and built so that they could travel through human tissue and blood, if surgeons function, the researchers say.
“The authors’ robots, although not autonomous in their current form, can be seen as a platform on which ‘brains’ and a battery can be attached,” wrote scientists Allan M Brooks and Michael S Strano, who did not work in the study. , in an article at the announcement.
The main breakthrough of the new research was the construction of small electrochemical actuators, which are then used to form the legs of the robots. These legs are about 0.1mm in size, or across the width of human hair.
Despite their small scale, the robots can be operated on if they are stimulated with lasers so that they can run.
Engineers can operate them by riding on the legs with ultralight currents, which force the legs to rotate and then rotate, and move the robots forward and backward as they do.
What’s more, the robots can be created in large numbers, with the researchers behind the new paper producing more than a million of the walking robots on just a 4-inch piece of silicon.
The scientists behind the study claim that the robots were the first to be made smaller than 0.1mm that can be controlled with toy electronics.
What’s more, they are able to withstand harsh environments, continue to work even in the face of very acidic conditions and extreme temperature variations. Since they could be injected through hypodermic needles, a version of the robot could be used to examine the inside of animal or human bodies, the researchers say.
There are still major limitations to the robots, the researchers accept. They are slower than other similar robots that can swim, they cannot sink their surroundings, and they need to be controlled from the outside.
As such, they are something like “puppets”, instead of a fully autonomous robot. While such an approach makes impressive demonstrations of technology, researchers are investigating the need for some autonomy before such miniature robots can be used for real-world practical applications.
But if researchers are able to integrate breakthroughs like these with more advanced autonomous systems, then they can make it possible to fulfill the vision of Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman that it is possible to “swallow the surgeon” and “make a little robot that “ships can travel through blood to perform surgery where necessary”, Brooks and Strano wrote in their accompanying Nature article.
The study is described in a paper, ‘Electronically integrated, mass-produced, microscopic robots’, published in Nature today.
