Digital Ants
Its a few years in the future and you are sitting on your couch after a long day at work at your virtual office watching “Goodfellas” (R.I.P. Ray) for the eleventh time on your video wall, while picking at a Hostess cupcake that you have been hiding in the back of the hydrator for weeks. A few crumbs fall to the highly polished composite floor, which could be just the evidence that the wife needs to search the kitchen for cupcake contraband, but you gesture left toward the video wall which opens a set of virtual controls and you point to the button marked “C”. Within seconds those crumbs that could have exposed you to a litany of negative references to your health and the threat of an actual visit to a doctor for a check-up, are gone and all evidence of the hidden cupcakes are gone. Life is good again.
So how did those cupcake crumbs disappear? You don’t have a dog so we can rule out absorption by a canis lupus familiaris, and Roomba went out of business years ago, so where did the crumbs go and who took them? The answer is ‘the robots got ‘em’. Does it sound a bit like science fiction or even science fantasy? It’s not based on developments by a group of engineers at Northwestern University who have developed the smallest remote-controlled walking robots ever built, roughly 1/3 the size of a typical ant, and the idea that in the future a pack of such little scavengers would sit in a box under the couch waiting to be called on to clean, polish or perform other functions for you, is not science fiction but merely a practical application of that research.
These little crab-like creatures are not battery powered or driven by complex electronics, but are constructed of alloys that when heated conform into a ‘memory’ shape and are coated with a thin layer of elastic glass that pulls them back to their original shape as they cool. Currently these miniscule robots are controlled by a remote controlled laser that starts the ‘walking’ process by heating the ‘legs’ of the bots, and by having the laser scan the legs in a particular direction, the bots will ‘walk’ that same way, and as these structures are so small they cool quickly, which allows them to walk or swim more quickly as their size decreases.
The same team at Northwestern devised a process to fabricate these bots by bonding the flat alloy materials to a stretched rubber substrate. When the rubber is relaxed it buckles and the alloy ‘pops’ into a pre-defined 3 dimensional shape, allowing them to create robots of any size or 3D shape. Movement of shapes can take the form of bending, twisting, and expanding, which allows the devices to crawl, walk, turn, and jump. Of course, these experiments are only the basis for the creation of commercial devices, although the team previously developed a winged microchip last September, the smallest man-made flying structure ever built, about the size of a grain of sand, so it would seem the possibilities are not limited to ground work.
In order to commercialize such devices other methods for ‘stimulating’ them would have to be developed, but nano-fabrication, an outgrowth of semiconductor process technology, is a rapidly developing field, and the application of nano-scale power sources and processors to such devices is a possibility, although the cost of production will be the major consideration for commercialization. That said, at least the process for creating the structures has been simplified and uses common semiconductor materials and processes, such as Si wafers, sputtering, annealing, photoresist patterning, and tape transfer, and while we are still some time away from these bots helping you to keep your Hostess cupcake habit from the wife, its not really science fiction anymore. For now, use a paper plate.
So how did those cupcake crumbs disappear? You don’t have a dog so we can rule out absorption by a canis lupus familiaris, and Roomba went out of business years ago, so where did the crumbs go and who took them? The answer is ‘the robots got ‘em’. Does it sound a bit like science fiction or even science fantasy? It’s not based on developments by a group of engineers at Northwestern University who have developed the smallest remote-controlled walking robots ever built, roughly 1/3 the size of a typical ant, and the idea that in the future a pack of such little scavengers would sit in a box under the couch waiting to be called on to clean, polish or perform other functions for you, is not science fiction but merely a practical application of that research.
These little crab-like creatures are not battery powered or driven by complex electronics, but are constructed of alloys that when heated conform into a ‘memory’ shape and are coated with a thin layer of elastic glass that pulls them back to their original shape as they cool. Currently these miniscule robots are controlled by a remote controlled laser that starts the ‘walking’ process by heating the ‘legs’ of the bots, and by having the laser scan the legs in a particular direction, the bots will ‘walk’ that same way, and as these structures are so small they cool quickly, which allows them to walk or swim more quickly as their size decreases.
The same team at Northwestern devised a process to fabricate these bots by bonding the flat alloy materials to a stretched rubber substrate. When the rubber is relaxed it buckles and the alloy ‘pops’ into a pre-defined 3 dimensional shape, allowing them to create robots of any size or 3D shape. Movement of shapes can take the form of bending, twisting, and expanding, which allows the devices to crawl, walk, turn, and jump. Of course, these experiments are only the basis for the creation of commercial devices, although the team previously developed a winged microchip last September, the smallest man-made flying structure ever built, about the size of a grain of sand, so it would seem the possibilities are not limited to ground work.
In order to commercialize such devices other methods for ‘stimulating’ them would have to be developed, but nano-fabrication, an outgrowth of semiconductor process technology, is a rapidly developing field, and the application of nano-scale power sources and processors to such devices is a possibility, although the cost of production will be the major consideration for commercialization. That said, at least the process for creating the structures has been simplified and uses common semiconductor materials and processes, such as Si wafers, sputtering, annealing, photoresist patterning, and tape transfer, and while we are still some time away from these bots helping you to keep your Hostess cupcake habit from the wife, its not really science fiction anymore. For now, use a paper plate.
Robot crab on US coin - Source: Northwestern University
Crab Structure 2D layout - Source: See citation
- Optical Image of various robots constructed in SMA and PI - Scale: 500um - Source: See citation
Citation: (Yonggang Huang & Yihui Zhang, 2022)
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