World’s Smallest Wheeled Robot With A Gripper
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 6 of July , 2009 at 2:40 am
As the designer of this microbot says, “at this point in time, I believe this may be the world’s smallest wheeled robot with a gripper. That will no doubt change, tomorrow or next week, when someone builds something smaller.” Until that happens, this 1/20 cubic inch robot looks like it takes the prize, differentiating itself from other tiny robots with the addition of a gripper.
Wondering how all the electronics and motors fit inside that tiny little robot? Here’s the secret: they don’t.
The motors, batteries, and microcontroller are all mounted underneath the surface that the robot operates on, and magnets on a 2 axis CNC pull the robot along with the field that they create. From what I can tell, rotating the field controls the gripper arm. There’s an Instructable on the whole thing if you’d like details, and the same guy also has instructions for building a slightly larger microbot with onboard hardware, here.
[ Instructables ] VIA [ Make ]
Comments (3)
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Comment by Alex
Made Monday, 6 of July , 2009 at 11:13 am
I don’t know if you can really call it the world’s smallest robot. The “robot” part is just one of its moving parts; the whole machine measures much larger than 1/20 cubic inch.
Comment by Evan Ackerman
Made Tuesday, 7 of July , 2009 at 3:09 am
It’s a fair point, yeah. I just liked the out of the box thinking that made this machine (that a better term?) smaller by literally taking everything out of the box while preserving the functionality of the gripper.
Comment by tvl1707
Made Wednesday, 22 of July , 2009 at 10:03 am
From what I can tell, rotating the field controls the gripper arm
Comment by olly
Made Wednesday, 16 of December , 2009 at 8:40 pm
are these openly available to buy?