Engineers at Cornell University developed a microscopic robot – so small it’s invisible to the naked eye – that walks. It’s so tiny that ten could fit within a period. The team says they can manufacture one million of the robots per week.
The new robot is essentially a microchip on four origami-inspired legs that can be activated by lasers. It was designed to crawl inside the human body, find and eliminate diseases. It can be steered by beaming a laser at its feet, which causes their leg to bend.
Itai Cohen and Paul McEuen Labs, leaders of this invention, envisions them as a beneficial medical tool to do things like hunt down and destroy cancer cells. The micro-bots are so small they can be injected into the body.
Building a robot that small wasn’t the hard part, the team told BBC News. The hard part was mobility – giving such a tiny machine a way to walk around.
Cornell physicist Itai Cohen said:
People have become very good at shrinking computer chips to microscopic dimensions. The problem was that there weren’t any legs that would work at that scale that could connect to these microchips. We invented a new technology [that’s] essentially the legs for these robotic brains.
For now, the micro-bot is far from being about to hunt disease in the human body. The only achievement attained so far is the working legs. Nevertheless, the team is excited about the milestone and will continue to develop the machine, hoping that someday it will serve as a medical device and save lives.
Cohen said:
You could imagine having these as little microsurgery devices. You inject these robots in, they locally track down either bacteria or maybe a tumor cell, and then they go snip it up and destroy it.
You can watch a video below of the robots wiggling around!
