A German group working on something called the MiCRoN Project (Miniaturised Co-operative Robots advancing towards the Nano range. One can only wonder how they spell that out in German) has demostrated some progress on useful micro-scale robot development:
The MICRON project team, led by the Institute for Process Control and Robotics (IPR), Karlsruhe, Germany, brought together eight international partners. Funded under the European Commission’s FET (Future and Emerging Technologies) initiative of the IST programme, MICRON set out to build a total of five to ten micro robots, just cubic centimetres in size.
“Each one would measure about 1.5cm by 3 cm,” says IPR’s Joerg Seyfried. “They were designed to be complete robots, with different kinds of actuators for gripping, cell manipulation, and so on. Each one would be wireless, with lots of electronics on board, and an infrared control system – rather like a TV remote, but two-way in this case. They would be able to cooperate together on a range of tasks.”
Note that up to this point all of language is conditional: “Each one would measure,” “would be able…”
Building the robots involved developing many custom applications, he adds. “One of these was the wireless powering system, the ‘power floor’, which allows the robot to get energy from its surroundings,” he says. “It uses a coil system to transmit the electricity through the air.”
The robots were designed as part of a networked system: “The individual robots are not that intelligent,” explains Seyfried. “They don’t, for example, know where they are, although they know which direction they are moving in. We developed a special positioning system, so that we know where each robot is. It views them from 40 to 50 cm above. They are controlled by a central robot control system, with several networked computers for planning and commands – this could theoretically control many robots.”
The hardest part of the project was “getting the hardware integrated and running – our goal was to have five robots operational, but this couldn’t be done in our three-year timeframe owing to the extreme complexity of the task,” he says.
Nevertheless, the one fully functional robot that the project did achieve could be tested in three different scenarios. “The first was a medical or biological application, in which the robot was handling biological cells, injecting liquid into them,” Seyfried explains. “The second scenario was micro-assembly, in which the robot soldered tiny parts. The final scenario looked at atomic force, with the robot mounting atomic force and doing experiments on it.”
The results were encouraging. “Our experiments showed that the cell injection is entirely feasible, as is the micro soldering,” says Seyfried. Although the MICRON robots are clearly not a mass market product, commercialisation – though still far off – would be perfectly possible, he believes: “Robots with this sort of capability, and mobility, would be perfectly suited to lab work, such as the micro assembly of prototypes. Tasks such as cell injection could be performed on a mass scale.”
It seems like someone’s missing the point. The interesting and challenging part of micro- and (cough) nano-scale robotics isn’t figuring out applications, its actually building the suckers. You don’t win a Nobel Prize for thinking up clever uses for a fusion reactor. That this group was able to even construct one functional robot on this scale, along with a power-supply scheme is pretty impressive.
Via Medical News Today…
Link to the MiCRoN Project…