Related papers: Modular electronic microrobots with on board senso…

Modular microrobotics can potentially address many information-intensive microtasks in medicine, manufacturing and the environment. However, surface area has limited the natural powering, communication, functional integration, and…

Building intelligent autonomous systems at any scale is challenging. The sensing and computation constraints of a microrobot platform make the problems harder. We present improvements to learning-based methods for on-board learning of…

Semiconductor microelectronics are emerging as a powerful tool for building smart, autonomous robots too small to see with the naked eye. Yet a number of existing microrobot platforms, despite significant advantages in speed, robustness,…

Many organisms leverage an interplay between shape and activity to generate motion and adapt to their environment. Embedding such feedback into synthetic microrobots could eliminate the need for sensors, software, and actuators, yet current…

Modular small-scale robots offer the potential for on-demand assembly and disassembly, enabling task-specific adaptation in dynamic and constrained environments. However, existing modular magnetic platforms often depend on workspace…

Collective control of mobile microrobotic swarms is indispensable for their potential high-impact applications in targeted drug delivery, medical diagnostics, parallel micromanipulation, and environmental sensing and remediation. Lack of…

This paper presents a low-cost, centralized modular underwater robot platform, ModCube, which can be used to study swarm coordination for a wide range of tasks in underwater environments. A ModCube structure consists of multiple ModCube…

We introduce a system of light driven microscopic autonomous moving particles that move on a flat surface. The design is simple, yet effective: Micrometer sized objects with wedge shape are produced by photopolymerization, they are covered…

In most macro-scale robotics systems , propulsion and controls are enabled through a physical tether or complex on-board electronics and batteries. A tether simplifies the design process but limits the range of motion of the robot, while…

An important function of autonomous microrobots is the ability to perform robust movement over terrain. This paper explores an edge ML approach to microrobot locomotion, allowing for on-device, lower latency control under compute, memory,…

Lablets are autonomous microscopic particles with programmable CMOS electronics that can control electrokinetic phenomena and electrochemical reactions in solution via actuator and sensor microelectrodes. In this paper, we describe the…

Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…

Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…

Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…

Many soft-body organisms found in nature flourish underwater. Similarly, soft robots are potentially well-suited for underwater environments partly because the problematic effects of gravity, friction, and harmonic oscillations are less…

Artificial microswimmers are a new technology with promising microfluidics and biomedical applications, such as directed cargo transport, microscale assembly, and targeted drug delivery. A fundamental barrier to realising this potential is…

Here, we report on a new class active particles capable of dynamically programmable motion powered by electricity. We have implemented physical principles that separate the propulsion and steering mechanisms of active motion using optically…

Design of robots at the small scale is a trial-and-error based process, which is costly and time-consuming. There are few dynamic simulation tools available to accurately predict the motion or performance of untethered microrobots as they…

Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…

While miniaturization has been a goal in robotics for nearly 40 years, roboticists have struggled to access sub-millimeter dimensions without making sacrifices to on-board information processing due to the unique physics of the microscale.…