Ant-Sized Microbots Travel in Swarms
While Hollywood focuses on robots several times taller than humans, some researchers are building tiny robots that could fit on your fingernail. These microbots would work in swarms to collect data for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, and medicine. The researchers, from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, use a novel approach to allow robots to be built cheaply and in large quantities. Working on a limited budget, they built an entire robot on a single circuit board. Single-chip designs have previously been hard to design and manufacture. However, instead of soldering the components together using conventional methods, the researchers used conductive adhesive to attach different modules to a flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. They then folded the circuit board to create the robot. Different modules allow the robot to communicate, move, store energy, and collect data. The tiny...