Troop of a million microscopic walking robots created to enable scientific explorations
Scientists have developed a million walking robots for research at a microscopic level. These robots that are developed by a team of scientists from Cornell University are powered by pulses of laser light.
These robots are about 5 microns thick, 40 microns wide, and between 40 and 70 microns long, roughly the size of a single-celled organism like a paramecium. Their bodies contain a simple silicon photovoltaic circuit that powers their legs, which are made of electrochemical actuators.
According to a report by News Atlas, the legs are made of strips of platinum just a few dozen atoms thick with a layer of inert titanium on one side and polymer panels along the top.
“While these robots are primitive in their function – they’re not very fast, they don’t have a lot of computational capability – the innovations that we made to make them compatible with standard microchip fabrication open the door to making these microscopic robots smart, fast and mass producible,” says Itai Cohen, lead researcher on the study. “This is really just the first shot across the bow that, hey, we can do electronic integration on a tiny robot.”
The study was published in the journal Nature.
