Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
The diminutive is long It was a challenge in history Robots.
While engineers have made great strides in miniaturizing electronics in the past few decades, independent miniaturized device makers Robots We were unable to achieve the goal of making their size less than 1 mm. This is because small arms and legs are fragile and difficult to manufacture. Above all, the conditions of the laws of physics change in the microscopic world. Instead of gravity and inertia, drag and viscosity become dominant.
Against this background, researchers in the United States She announced Results of a study that fulfills a 40-year-old challenge. A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan has developed a new robot that is smaller than a grain of salt, with dimensions of just 200 x 300 x 50 micrometers. At 0.3mm on the longest side, this is well below the 1mm threshold. However, he is able to sense things around him, make decisions for himself, and swim and move around in the water.
Moreover, it operates completely autonomously and does not depend on any external controls such as wires or magnetic fields. The production cost is said to be as low as 1 cent per unit.
“We have succeeded in reducing the size of the autonomous robot to 1/10,000 the size of a conventional robot,” says Mark Miskin. One of the researchersis an assistant professor of electrical systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “This opens up a whole new scope for programmable robots.”
Electric slide
The propulsion system developed by Miskin and his team is a breakthrough in the field of traditional robotics. Fish and other large aquatic organisms move forward due to the reaction of water pushing back, according to Third law of motion In Newtonian mechanics. But pushing water on a microscopic scale is similar to pushing clay tar. The viscosity of the water is so great that little arms and legs can never compete with it.
So the researchers adopted a completely new approach. Instead of swimming by moving parts of its body, the new robot moves by generating an electric field around itself and gently pushing charged particles into the fluid. The robot exploits the phenomenon that moving charged particles pull on nearby water molecules, creating a water current around the robot. It is as if the robot itself is not moving, but rather the ocean or river is moving.
