Researchers at Cornell University have created microscopic robots that, while rudimentary, promise a future in which robots can easily navigate the human body.
The robots walk on four electrochemical actuators. Besides those limbs, each robot consists of a simple circuit and operates at low voltage and low power. To control the robots, laser pulses are flashed at different photovoltaics to charge the legs. Going back and forth between the front and back photovoltaics enables the robots to walk.
The research comes from Itai Cohen, professor of physics; and Paul McEuen, the John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science—both in the College of Arts and Sciences—and their former postdoctoral researcher, Marc Miskin, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Their paper, “Electronically Integrated, Mass-Manufactured, Microscopic Robots,” was published on Aug. 26 in Nature.
The machines are basic, but they represent an important step forward, according to the researchers.
“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,” Cohen said in a statement. “This is really just the first shot across the bow that, hey, we can do electronic integration on a tiny robot.”
And they are indeed tiny, coming in at about 5 microns thick (a micron is one-millionth of a meter), 40 microns wide, and approximately 40 to 70 microns in length.
More complicated robots based on the same design could one day swarm the human body, promising new capabilities in medicine and new insight into what we can explore. “I think machines like these are going to take us into all kinds of amazing worlds that are too small to see,” said Miskin, the study’s lead author.