Microbot Delivers Paperclips On 512 Itty Bitty Legs
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Tuesday, 6 of July , 2010 at 12:28 am
This microbot, born out of a collaboration between the University of Washington and Stanford, weighs half a gram, is about the size of a dime, and is thinner than your fingernail. This robot actually started out as a prototype part for a paper-thin scanner or printer back in the 90s. Then, the same hardware was used to design a docking system for picosatellites (more on that here). It was only recently that researchers flipped the thing over on its back and discovered that it could not only walk, but carry up to seven times its own weight while moving in any direction at a blistering 3 feet per hour.
The microbot has 512 teeny tiny individual legs, grouped into 128 clusters of four, positioned orthogonally to one another to allow for movement in any direction. The legs consist of an electrical wire sandwiched between two different thermally reactive materials. When electricity runs through the wire, the materials heat and the outside one expands, forcing the foot to curl. When the current is turned off, the foot cools, returning to its original position. At such small scales, this process can happen very rapidly, and the feet are able to complete a movement cycle between 20 and 30 times every second.
Since the microbot didn’t start off life as a robot at all, it’s far from optimized… For example, minor modifications could likely reduce its weight by about 90%, which would boost its power to weight ratio (and potential payload) even higher. This means that it should be relatively straightforward to equip the robot with a battery, circuit board, and sensors, making it entirely autonomous.
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