A creepy-crawly of the digital kind comes to mind when looking at this tiny bot resting on a penny. The notion of a swarm of these channels the bots in the questionable but interesting redo of the Day the Earth stood Still circa 2008. In the film, GORT, a robot comprised of self-replicating nano entities as small as this guy, begins to eliminate all trappings of man before Klaatu saves mankind by activating the sphere, thus stopping the swarm at the expense of electrical activity on Earth, per Klaatu's warning that there will be "a price to the [human] way of life."[6]
Making tiny robots is far from a new idea: nanobots have been popular in science fiction for decades, and researchers around the world have already successfully created microscopically small robots that can navigate inside living creatures, either for exploratory purposes, or for delivering drugs to specific parts of the anatomy.
But those robots are often designed to swim or simply drift through the liquids already moving through a body’s circulatory system. What the researchers at Northwestern University have accomplished, as detailed in a paper published in the Science Robotics journal yesterday, is building a robot that can be remotely steered without wires or a physical connection and that scampers around on either a set of legs or other, more unorthodox forms of locomotion.
The robot crab the researchers created measures just half a millimeter wide, or roughly 0.02-inches across, and can move at a speed of about half of its body length every second. Unsurprisingly, it’s no speed demon, but like a tick that’s hopped on to your body during a hike in the woods, one of its biggest advantages is that it can move about without being detected, as it is both so small and incredibly lightweight.
Imagine when bots this small are able to fly and swarm, under the control of AI. This is when it gets interesting to the max, right?
Creepy crawlies indeed.
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