Robot smaller than grain of salt can ‘sense, think and act’

Solving a technical challenge that has stymied science for 40 years, researchers have built a robot with an onboard computer, sensors and a motor, the whole assembly less than 1 millimeter in size — smaller than a grain of salt.

The feat, accomplished by a partnership of researchers at University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan, advances medicine toward a future that might see tiny robots sent into the human body to rewire damaged nerves, deliver medicines to precise areas, and determine the health of a patient’s cells without surgery.

“It’s the first tiny robot to be able to sense, think and act,” said Marc Miskin, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering at University of Pennsylvania, and an author of a paper describing the work published this week in the journal Science Robotics.

The device, billed as the world’s smallest robot able to make decisions for itself, represents a major step toward a goal once rooted in science fiction. In the 1960s, the story and movie “Fantastic Voyage” imagined a medical team placed aboard a submarine and shrunk to the size of a microbe. The microscopic medical crew was then injected into the body of a dying man in order to destroy an inoperable blood clot.

“In the future, let’s say 100 years, anything a surgeon does today, we’d love to do with a robot,” said David Gracias, a professor in the department of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the study. “We are not there yet.”

In 1989, two decades after “Fantastic Voyage,” Rodney A. Brooks and Anita M. Flynn, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote a paper called, “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control: A Robot Invasion of the Solar System,” that described a robot they’d built measuring just 1¼ cubic inches, dubbed Squirt.

Sawyer Fuller, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Washington, said that when “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” was published, “people thought microrobotics was coming any minute now. … Turns out it has taken a little longer than expected to put all these things together.”

Fuller, who was not involved in building the new microrobot, called it “the vanguard of a new class of device.”

Miskin said the microrobot built by the Michigan and Pennsylvania teams is about 1/100th the size of MIT’s Squirt but isn’t ready for biomedical use.

“It would not surprise me if in 10 years, we would have real uses for this type of robot,” said David Blaauw, a co-author of the paper in Science Robotics and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at University of Michigan.

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