With all the misery and sadness of the inevitable apocalypse of robots, we have at least been able to comfort ourselves in the fact that we will see them coming, to this day. Researchers at Northwestern University have foolishly managed to build a remote-controlled robot crab that is so small that it can crawl over the edge of a penny.
Making small robots is far from a new idea: nanobots have been popular in science fiction for decades, and researchers around the world have already successfully created small microscopic robots that can navigate inside living things. , either for exploratory purposes or to deliver medicines to specific places. parts of the anatomy.
But these robots are often designed to swim or simply drift away from fluids that are already moving through the body’s circulatory system. What researchers at Northwestern University have achieved, as detailed in an article published yesterday in the journal Science Robotics, is to build a robot that can be controlled remotely without wires or physical connection and that moves with a set of legs or others. less orthodox forms of locomotion.
The robot crab created by the researchers is only half a millimeter wide, or about 0.02 inches in diameter, and can move at a speed of about half its body length every second. Not surprisingly, it’s not a speed demon, but like a tick climbing on your body during a walk in the woods, one of its most important advantages is that it can move undetected because it’s as small as incredibly light.
So how did researchers find batteries, servomotors, and other electronic devices small enough to squeeze the half-millimeter crab? They didn’t. It uses a completely different approach to movement than complex multi-legged robots like the Boston Dynamics Spot. The crab is created from a memory-shaped alloy that is deformed by a thin layer of glass applied during the manufacturing process, but returns to its original original shape when heat is applied. So imagine that your arm is bent, but instead of muscles, just pointing a hair dryer at it causes it to stretch. When it cools later, it bends again.
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In this case, a precise laser beam is used to heat specific points of the robot crab’s body in specific sequences and, as its various parts are deformed and bent again as it is heated and cooled, the researchers can make it locomotive from point A. to point B, plus turn and jump as well. It’s not as clever or agile as a dog-like Spot robot, which can deftly climb stairs and escape rugged terrain, but Spot can’t crawl into a small crack in a wall or into the ground. someone’s ear. (A potentially nightmare potential use of this technology.)
A small crab was just a form that these micro-robots could take. Researchers also built robots of similar size that emulate the movements of inch worms, beetles and crickets, but could also make completely different shapes, depending on the environment in which they would operate. Moving around a beach, for example, would be much easier with repeated jumping movements, as on this scale these grains of sand would not be so small.