SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Engineers at Northwestern University have hit upon a scientific breakthrough in the field of robotics – the smallest remote-controlled robot in history.
And it looks like a crab.
“The students felt inspired and amused by the sideways crawling motions of tiny crabs. It was a creative whim,” team leader John A. Rogers told the university’s Northwestern Now.
The development is just the latest for the university’s robotics department, who has previously created robotic beetles, crickets and inchworms that measure about one millimeter. Their latest creation has a full range of movements – walking, crawling, bending, twisting and jumping – and that means a wide range of potential applications in the real world.
“Robotics is an exciting field of research, and the development of microscale robots is a fun topic for academic exploration,” Rogers said. “You might imagine micro-robots as agents to repair or assemble small structures or machines in industry or as surgical assistants to clear clogged arteries, to stop internal bleeding or to eliminate cancerous tumors — all in minimally invasive procedures.”
The robot is powered by a laser light that both activates the tiny crab by heating certain parts of the structure, which is made of a special alloy that “remembers” the crab-like form when it’s in its more deformed resting state, and directs it where to go.
“Because these structures are so tiny, the rate of cooling is very fast,” Rogers said. “In fact, reducing the sizes of these robots allows them to run faster.”
The team even invented a manufacturing method to create structures that are so small, they can stand comfortably on the side of a coin. The method was inspired by children’s pop-up books.
“First, the team fabricated precursors to the walking crab structures in flat, planar geometries,” author Amanda Morris described in the Northwestern Now piece. “Then, they bonded these precursors onto a slightly stretched rubber substrate. When the stretched substrate is relaxed, a controlled buckling process occurs that causes the crab to “pop up” into precisely defined three-dimensional forms.”
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