20 years ago, when I was a bright eyed graduate student, I was mesmerized by MEMS (micro-electro mechanical systems), which promised similar revolution. I learnt about 'artificial muscles', and MIT Technology Review even ran a cover issue on how MEMS will revolutionize everything. This article could have been written in the year 2000 except it would have mentioned MEMS then. Now there is no mention of it. I'm older and saner now. Still feels very much a academic pipe dream than real engineering. I dreamed of working with Kris Pister and now he is 20 years older. Another young professor at UPenn and Cornell is trying to get tenure....call me cynical but this too shall pass. Issues of toxicity in human body etc are huge...
I feel like I've been seeing stories like this, with accompanying microscopic footage, for decades. Has anyone ever built anything more complex than a simple actuator? These things seem to barely qualify as robots.
I really like the slaughterbots: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HipTO_7mUOw</a>
This is fantastic, but another approach would be to use the things that are already small and learn how they work, and then maybe reprogram them (i.e. bacteria).<p>Also, as Richard Feynman pointed out (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRCygdW--c</a>) at small scales water is thick like honey so it's probably more efficient to use a rotating turbine mechanism (i.e. flagella) for propulsion rather than trying to shrink paddles down to micron sizes.<p>And almost foreign material that you put in your body will eventually be covered in bacterial biofilms. So might as well learn how to program and control the bacteria in the first place.
I wonder what kind of "brain" would even be possible to put in a robot this small, given the physical limit we're approaching. Could limit the potential for certain dystopian scenarios.
This looks like the most important point:<p>> Dr. Miskin worked around the power conundrum by leaving out the batteries. Instead, he powers the robots by shining lasers on tiny solar panels on their backs
Flying microdrones have obvious applications (entertainment, replacing fireworks, on demand traffic guidance, etc.), but ground based versions are a mystery to me...
Or maybe we could inject them into the brain, and then could 'override basic autonomic function. Maybe we could use this on a recently dead body and it could do simple things, like amble around, maybe grab things, or bite.