{"id":4422,"date":"2022-07-07T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-07-07T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/?p=4422"},"modified":"2022-06-20T06:26:26","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T06:26:26","slug":"five-of-the-worlds-tiniest-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modernsciences.org\/staging\/4414\/five-of-the-worlds-tiniest-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"Five of the world\u2019s tiniest robots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n The RoboFly.\n University of Washington<\/a><\/span>\n <\/figcaption>\n <\/figure>\n\nJoao Filipe Ferreira<\/a>, Nottingham Trent University<\/a><\/em><\/span>\n\n

Allow me to take you on a trip down my memory lane. As a young lad, a film I saw captured my imagination: Fantastic Voyage<\/a>, a 1966 release about people shrunk to microscopic size and sent into the body of an injured scientist to repair his brain. The idea struck a chord with me. I envisioned one day science would be able to create some sort of miniature machine that performs medical procedures from the inside. <\/p>\n\n

Fast forward several decades into the 21st century, when I started my career as a robotics researcher taking inspiration from neuroscience to implement artificial perception systems. I thought of robots as machines that range from the size of a pet animal to big devices designed to carry out heavy-duty chores. However, I soon started to hear the first hints about research into miniature robots playing exactly the type of role the miniature scientists in Fantastic Voyage acted out. Did this mean that what I imagined as a child was about to come true? <\/p>\n\n

Recently, a team of researchers from Stanford University, California, achieved the first milestone towards the development of 7.8mm wide origami robots: a proof-of- concept prototype. They dubbed it a millirobot<\/a>. The robot uses the folding\/unfolding of Kresling origami to roll, flip and spin. These robots are operated wirelessly using magnetic fields to move in narrow spaces and morph their shape for medical tasks, such as disease diagnosis, drug delivery, and even surgery. They are a part of a new trend in what is called \u201ctiny robot\u201d research<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n

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