World’s Smallest Autonomous Robots Could Save Lives

The researchers’ major breakthrough was enabling a robot just one-fifth of a millimeter long to move autonomously without external assistance, a challenge scientists have been trying to solve for decades. Physical forces such as drag and viscosity have a much stronger effect on objects at the microscopic scale, making movement through a liquid comparable to swimming through tar at the human scale.

The world’s smallest autonomous robot requires the world’s smallest computer. That title belongs to a computer developed by David Blaauw’s team at Michigan . The researchers adapted their microcomputer to Penn’s propulsion system and built a complete computer with a processor, memory, and sensors on a chip less than a millimeter across.

The robot receives light through microscopic solar panels that generate only 75 nanowatts of power – over 100,000 times less than a smartwatch, according to Blaauw. His team had to make the microcomputer circuits operate at extremely low voltages, reducing power consumption by more than a factor of 1,000.
Perhaps the most striking feature is the overall system cost.

Although each robot costs about one cent to produce at scale, one might assume that the equipment needed to program and control them would be prohibitively expensive. That is not the case.
“It’s about $100,” Marc Miskin, a professor at Penn Engineering and lead author of the study, told me by email.

The team has already built a low-cost version of their setup using standard LED diodes, a Raspberry Pi microcomputer, and an imaging system consisting of a smartphone camera fitted with a macro lens.

“This system actually performs about as well as our fancy $100k microscope. Because the robot is doing all the hard work, it doesn’t need you to tell it what to do,” Miskin explained.


The microrobots feature electronic sensors capable of detecting temperature with a precision of one-third of a degree Celsius, allowing them to monitor the health of individual cells.

However, several obstacles remain before this technology can be applied to human health.

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