Flea-sized robots called Smart Dust
There’s strength in numbers. This bit of wisdom has been proven time and again by bees and ants – those social animals that pack a lot of punch in crowds of themselves, albeit being tiny as individuals. At the University of California in Berkeley, electrical engineers bank on this idea by making flea-bots that could make an impact in swarms.
The collective term for the swarm of flea-bots is Smart Dust. It’s supposed to be composed of flea-sized two-legged robots that could jump up to 30 times their size. Such groups of miniscule bots could be used to look for survivors in a rubble after an earthquake, or create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemical substances, for example.
A team of electrical engineers at UC Berkeley are hard at work in pursuit of their Smart Dust dream. Former grad student Sarah Bergbreiter leads the way in developing autonomous robots fabricated by the same technology used to make integrated circuits. Currently, the prototypes are these solar-powered microbots 8.5 mm long and less than 4 mm wide. MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) is the key to the microbots’ locomotion.
To put it simply, the microbots move through a method similar to the way a person climbs a ladder, repeatedly engaging a shuttle that pulls a flea leg forward and then engages it again to move it a bit more. There are plans of making the microbots smaller and integrating wings on them, but these will come later.
We’ve always thought of robots as big, lumbering machines. It’s a novel idea to come up with a group of tiny robots that could still function after one of them fails.
Via UC Berkeley College of Engineering
There’s strength in numbers. This bit of wisdom has been proven time and again by bees and ants – those social animals that pack a lot of punch in crowds of themselves, albeit being tiny as individuals. At the University of California in Berkeley, electrical engineers bank on this idea by making flea-bots that could make an impact in swarms.
The collective term for the swarm of flea-bots is Smart Dust. It’s supposed to be composed of flea-sized two-legged robots that could jump up to 30 times their size. Such groups of miniscule bots could be used to look for survivors in a rubble after an earthquake, or create networks of distributed sensors for detecting chemical substances, for example.
A team of electrical engineers at UC Berkeley are hard at work in pursuit of their Smart Dust dream. Former grad student Sarah Bergbreiter leads the way in developing autonomous robots fabricated by the same technology used to make integrated circuits. Currently, the prototypes are these solar-powered microbots 8.5 mm long and less than 4 mm wide. MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) is the key to the microbots’ locomotion.
To put it simply, the microbots move through a method similar to the way a person climbs a ladder, repeatedly engaging a shuttle that pulls a flea leg forward and then engages it again to move it a bit more. There are plans of making the microbots smaller and integrating wings on them, but these will come later.
We’ve always thought of robots as big, lumbering machines. It’s a novel idea to come up with a group of tiny robots that could still function after one of them fails.