I-Swarm Robots

 

Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale. I-SWARM robots are three-legged solar-powered droids which are less than 4 mm long, wide, tall.

These tiny (4 millimeters on a side) robots are members of the I-SWARM project, which stands for Intelligent Small-World Autonomous Robots for Micro-manipulation. Each robot is simple, with three legs and a little poker to manipulate stuff with. They’re designed to work in large, cheap, mass producible, replaceable groups doing things that insects would be good at… Surveillance, obviously, but they could also do things like clean your house by taking care of one bit of dust each.

At the moment, researchers are trying to figure out how to mass produce these things cheaply and efficiently. Some earlier I-SWARM robots, called Jasmine (each one of them was called Jasmine, I guess), are significantly larger (inch scale rather than millimeter scale) but have been able to display some insect-like behaviors such as cooperative foraging using simple communication and “optical pheromones.” We’ve got video of that, after the jump.