EVANSTON, Ill. (1010 WINS) – A tiny robotic crab engineered by Northwestern University has become the smallest-ever remote-controlled walking robot in the world.
The half-millimeter wide crab robot can bend, twist, crawl, walk, turn and even jump. The NU researchers believe that their technology might bring the field closer to micro-sized robots that can perform inside tightly confined spaces including the human body.
The robot can move without complex hardware or electricity according to the research published today in the journal Science Robotics.
“Robotics is an exciting field of research, and the development of microscale robots is a fun topic for academic exploration,” John A. Rogers, director of the Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics, who led the experimental work, said in the press release. “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 elastic resilience of the robot's body is constructed so that it has a shape-memory alloy material that transforms to its “remembered” shape when heated. A thin glass returns that corresponding part of the structure to its deformed shape after cooling.
A laser remotely controls the robot to activate it and determines the walking directions.
“Because these structures are so tiny, the rate of cooling is very fast,” Rogers explained. “In fact, reducing the sizes of these robots allows them to run faster.”
Rogers worked with Yonggang Huang, Jan and Marcia Achenbach Professor of Mechanical Engineering, to manufacture the tiny robot. They turned to a technique introducer eight years ago, a pop-up method inspired by a child’s pop-up book.
The team first made the walking crab structures in flat, planar geometries. They then bonded these onto a slightly stretched rubber. A controlled buckling process then causes the crab to “pop up” into a three-dimensional form. With this new robot, the team can make a robot of any size and shape.
“With these assembly techniques and materials concepts, we can build walking robots with almost any sizes or 3D shapes,” Rogers said. “But the students felt inspired and amused by the sideways crawling motions of tiny crabs. It was a creative whim.”
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