Eco Factor: Solar-powered miniature robots for military surveillance.

The latest advancements in chip design and fabrication techniques has made researchers develop products that are smaller, more efficient and more intelligent than their predecessors. Using these tiny wonders of technology researchers from institutes in Sweden, Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland are trying to develop new “Microbots” that can be programmed from a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning and more.

Inspired from a swarm of biological insects, this new project dubbed I-SWARM (intelligent small-world autonomous robots for micro-manipulation), will be based on a completely new technique of building an entire robot on a single circuit board. The robots will not be bigger than the size of a flea and one day could be mass-produced and churned out in swarms to carry out a variety of applications.

Instead of soldering the electrical components on a PCB, the researchers make use of a special conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided PCB, which is then folded to create a three-dimensional robot. The robots are powered by a small solar panel, which manages to churn out about 3.7V. The robots move on three vibrating legs and carry a fourth vibrating leg that acts as a touch sensor.

The researchers explain that measuring less than 4mm, the robots won’t be able to do much work at their own, but a swarm of these intelligent robots that have the ability to communicate with each other using infrared sensors can form a group that can accomplish a variety of tasks.

Via: Physorg