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Micro-Robots Are Smallest, Fully Functional
Two micro-robots developed at Washington State University are claimed to be the smallest, lightest and fastest fully functional micro-robots ever made.
(Water-skimmer robot and mini-bug robot size comparison)
“That is fast compared to other micro-robots at this scale although it still lags behind their biological relatives,” said Conor Trygstad, a PhD student in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and lead author on the work. An ant typically weighs up to five milligrams and can move at almost a meter per second.
The key to the tiny robots is their tiny actuators that make the robots move. Trygstad used a new fabrication technique to miniaturize the actuator down to less than a milligram, the smallest ever known to have been made.
(Via SciTechDaily.)
I'll always remember coming across the amazing Scarab flying insect robot in a 1936 issue of Astounding Stories magazine. Raymond Z. Gallun was one of the three most famous authors of the Golden Age of science fiction (or scientifiction); he's fun to read even today.
The Scarab rubbed its hind legs together, as flies will do when at rest. Then, apparently satisfied that it was in condition, it unfolded the coleoptera-like plates over its wings. With a buzz that any uninformed person would have mistaken for that of a beetle, it started out on its journey.
(Read more about the scarab flying insect robot)
A year later, Gallun introduced the ultra-microrobot in A Menace in Miniature, published in Astounding Stories in 1937.
(Ultra-microrobot from A Menace in Miniature by Raymond Z. Gallun)
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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