See this friendly looking piece of equipment? Just stick your head in the middle there, and a tiny little robot will fix your eye problems and you’ll get telekinetic powers.* Those giant coils are very precise magnetic field generators, and they’re capable of manipulating a half-millimeter long microbot with a fine enough touch to get it to fix clots in the blood vessels in your eyes:

The whole system is called OctoMag, and the primary advantage that it offers (besides the robotic fine manipulation that makes other assistive surgical systems so promising) is that the microbot is completely untethered. So, instead of having to shove a bunch of needles into your eyeballs and dig around, one single needle can deposit the robot, which does its thing with minimal invasiveness and then comes back out via the same needle. Very tidy.

This same type of technology can also be used to do itty bitty construction projects, as in this video of the MiniMag magnetic micromanipulation system, which won the free-style and manipulation events at the 2010 NIST Microrobotics Challenge:

[ OctoMag (PDF) ]

*Telekinetic abilities not guaranteed

Part of the appeal of flapping wing micro air vehicles is that (unlike helicopters) they offer some resilience against crashing into obstacles. Crashing is still bad, though, and (with some exceptions) significant damage to things that fly generally keeps those things from continuing to be useful. To mitigate this, Harvard University has developed an itty bitty differential to keep a pair of wings (say, on a robot bee or robot fly) generating the same amount of torque, even if one of those wings is damaged. The beauty of the PARITy differential (Passive Aeromechanical Regulation of Imbalanced Torques) is that it’s completely mechanical, and simply due to its design it will (for example) increase the flapping speed of a damaged wing to match the torque output of a paired, undamaged wing. Basically, it’s the same kind of thing that you have controlling the power to the wheels in your car, except about a million times smaller.

VIA [ Gizmag ]

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.

[ UWNews ] VIA [ PFN ]

I don’t know enough about molecular biology for how this works to make any sense to me, but apparently, researchers at NYU have created an autonomous bipedal walking robot out of a single strand of DNA with a linkage in the middle. I’m going to just let them explain how it works:

The walking device consists of a strand of DNA that contains a 5′,5′ linkage in the middle. One leg is called L-E and the other is called L-O. It walks on a track consisting of a series of stem-loops (T1-T4) that are part of a stiff DX motif. It is fueled by a pair of successive stem-loops (F1 and F2) that are in solution. The driving force for its motion is the formation of more base pairs than exist at any given time. The system is shown below.

Alright, so I don’t get how this works at all, but it’s still pretty amazing that they’ve put together a bipedal robot with DNA legs. If you’re wondering why something like this might be useful, besides the first step towards forming a DNA soccer league, the same group has developed a “molecule capture system” that uses “DNA origami” to create little robots able to capture and move single molecules. And they’re seriously little… Each is a million times smaller than a red blood cell.

With technology like this, it becomes possible to start constructing nanoscale machines molecule by molecule. Machines of this size have the potential to travel around inside our bodies in huge numbers, continuously fixing everything that goes wrong with us. It may sound crazy, but it may also be the future.

[ Prof. Nadrian C. Seeman @ NYU ] VIA [ Gizmodo ]

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 ]

AeroVironment, makers of the Raven UAV and the Dragon Eye UAV (among other things), have been working for several years now on a DARPA funded program to develop micro nano air vehicles that use flapping wings as a lift and propulsion source. Now, we’ve seen a lot of robots that use flapping wings, but only one other robot that could use them to hover, like an insect or a hummingbird. The AeroVironment “Mercury” NAV isn’t as small as an insect, but it is about the size of a hummingbird, and surprise surprise, DARPA has asked AeroVironment to dress up the next prototype in a little costume:

Okay, so it’s a little hokey looking, but honestly, I bet it gets the job done: nobody who sees something that looks like that flying around on wings is very likely to think it’s a robot… Except for maybe you, right now, after reading this. Psst… They’re watching you.

From the look of things, this bot is just about ready to go: it has already demonstrated fully controllable untethered flight, so the next step is to get it carrying a payload and perhaps some autonomous capability. Hopefully we’ll get to see more of this thing in action, but probably the clearest indication of the success of this robot will be if the program suddenly ends, and we’re never told anything else about it ever again.

[ AeroVironment ]

Why spend time and energy trying to develop a nano-sized robot motor when you can just wrangle up a couple thousand bacteria to push you around? Researchers at the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the École Polytechnique de Montréal have created robots that measure only 300 micrometers on a side, complete with a solar panel, a pH sensor, and a communication circuit. When the robot senses elevated pH levels, it sends signals to an external computer, which directs a swarm of bacteria to push the robot towards the area of higher pH.

The bacteria themselves are quite interesting. They produce their own magnetite crystals, which they use to navigate along the Earth’s magnetic field lines looking for nice places to live. They can somehow tell which way they’re going, and they also respond to light, persistently swimming parallel to magnetic field lines when illuminated. It looks like this is how such precise motion is achieved: by changing magnetic fields and illumination, the external computer is able to direct the bacteria exactly where to go.

All of this is happening in a petri dish right now, but sometime somehow the researchers envision using this technique for medical purposes… Since nanobots propelled by thousands of magnetic bacteria is exactly what I want running around inside my body.

[ TR ] VIA [ Engadget ]

When size is a factor, surveillance robots generally seem to fall into one of two categories: small enough to perform relevant tasks but still be portable, or absolutely as small as possible. Meso-scale is one step above the as small as possible MAVs, but significantly smaller than most conventional robots. The compromise is designed to allow for favorable scaling and low costs, and back in 1999 Stanford took a crack at developing a centimeter scale rotary surveillance platform called the Mesicopter.

Although part of Stanford’s funding came from DARPA, their conception for the Mesicopter was more for environmental surveillance than tactical surveillance. For example, swarms of these low cost and low weight robots would be ideal for collecting atmospheric data, or exploring Mars. The Mesicopter was designed to use a lithium ion battery with an energy density of 130 mWh/g, which would have given the prototype a flight time of 30 minutes. However, the propellers didn’t end up being quite efficient enough, and although the Mesicopter was able to lift itself using off-board power, it ultimately wasn’t strong enough to lift its own batteries.

Keep in mind, though, that this was ten years ago… I imagine that if someone were to try to make this work again they’d have a much easier time of it, due to increased power to weight ratios of motors as well as energy density increases of batteries. Of course, I also imagine that someone has done this already, they just can’t tell anyone about it or guys in black suits will come and take them away.

[ Stanford Mesicopter ] VIA [ Neatorama ]

The types of power supplies we’re used to here in the macro world don’t tend to scale down to nanosizes very well. YOU just try building a combustion engine that’ll work in the human blood stream. Even batteries and electric motors have some finite minimum sizes. When it comes to cell sized machines, our bodies have a bunch of clever solutions that researchers are trying to steal, not the least of which are nanobot engines based on sperm.

Why sperm? Well, sperm are energetic little guys. They can swim along at up to 3 mm per minute, which is pretty good considering they’re only about 50 nanometers long, and they’re powered by stuff called ATP, which they make all by themselves from simple sugars. It’s this ability to create and utilize energy that researchers are interested in. Sperm have a bunch of bendy twisty proteins attached to their tails that turn sugar (glucose) into ATP (which is what your body uses to store and release energy), and then get rid of the waste products. This efficient system (it’s called glycolysis) has been successfully duplicated on a chip, and researchers think that these little ATP power supplies could be used to run all kinds of things from propellers to medication pumps.

I’m sorely tempted to end this post with all kinds of inappropriate things, but I’m going to be mature about it and just say that I’m all for this kind of research. As long as they don’t waste any of them.

[ MSN ] VIA [ Suicide Bots ]

When we wrote about the super tiny 16 gram DelFly MAV (micro air vehicle) last November, we promised that there were even smaller versions in the works, including the DelFly Micro at 5 grams. Looks like that was an overestimation, as the DelFly micro has had its maiden flight and it tips the scales at an incredibly tiny 3.07 grams. What do you get for 3.07 grams? Everything you could ask for, pretty much… The ornithopter has a 10 centimeter wingspan, is fully remote controllable, and includes an onboard camera that streams video to a base station:

The video isn’t much to write home about, but it’s easily sufficient to distinguish people and objects. It’s also apparently enough for some image recognition software to tell the DelFly where to go, but that’s a work in progress. At the size of a largeish dragonfly, this thing isn’t exactly invisible, but I imagine it’s fairly easy to mistake for something natural, if for no other reason than something the size of your palm flapping around doesn’t scream “spy robot” to most people. But don’t worry, according to the website, it’s just for science. ::cough:: Just in case the DelFly Micro isn’t quite subtle enough, Delft University of Technology is working on a bite size ‘nano’ version, which should operate at half the size of this one.

[ DelFly ] VIA [ IEEE Automaton ]