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Microrobot Developed at Dartmouth
TheSync writes "Dartmouth researchers have developed the world's smallest untethered, controllable microrobot. The microrobot is much smaller and less massive than previous controllable microrobots. It measures only 60 by 250 micrometers. It receives power and control signals from the grid of electrodes it walks on, and moves by bending its body like a caterpillar. Not quite nanomachines, but we are getting closer!"
The microrobot is much smaller as less massive than previous controllable microrobots.
Do you even glance at these before hitting "publish"?
Rex is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M.
I wish I had the wit to ridicule this properly. Note the care taken to distinguish between plain or peanut M&Ms...
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Hooray! Now we can have the world's tiniest caterpillar race!
Do the 'editors' ever actually read these submissions anymore?
Dartmouth researchers have developed the world's smallest untethered, controllable microrobot
Let me know when they develop uncontrollable microrobots.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
This sort of a device sounds useful for performing certain surgeries, namely tubal ligation in females. Or perhaps even as an intrauterine contraceptive. Imagine one of these devices scooting around, looking for eggs to envelop and destroy. It may very well be far safer than using drugs.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It's a waldo. A robot is independent; a robot makes its own decisions, whether based on the environment or anything the programmers dreamed up. This device is "teleoperated", as the builders say. The word for such a thing is waldo, not robot.
... therefore it is not "untethered".
How many microrobots can I control on such a grid ? You definitely don't want to have individual wire to each electrode. So it would be some kind of array similar to in semiconductor memories. I wonder what kind of addressing scheme would be required to make sure that we can control a whole army on the grid. I hope the forthcoming paper will have some discussion about it.
Their extremely tiny machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair, and half the length of the period at the end of this sentence. About 200 of these could march in a line across the top of a plain M&M. [...] Their paper describes a machine that measures 60 micrometers by 250 micrometers
Look at all the different units! WoaHHs, PatEoTSs, even um! Engineering like this is why NASA runs into problems whenever they try to do a joint operation with the ESA.
cute little fella, isn't it?
You say that now, but wait till millions of the lil' bastards take over your body and make you servile to a dark cyborg queen!
anything. It's it great the way we always hear about groundbreaking achievements that "could" be used in future applications, but we never actually hear about the applications? Just once I'd like to see a press release where the scientists say "and it can do this useful function right now which we intend to start a spinoff company to commercialise."
How we know is more important than what we know.
"At very small scales, this machine is surprisingly fast."
I just thought that was pretty funny. I mean, at pretty small scales a sloth is a speeding bullet. But his point obviously is that it has a large speed to size ratio.
And did anyone else notice that during the video linked in the article as he says, "These robots are maybe 10x the size of human blood cells", while the video shows red blood cells on the machine. It's clear from the image that what he is saying is clearly not true. Maybe just bad editing.
Bill McLellan, the guy who won Feynman's motor challenge would have won sooner but he kept losing his motor in the dust on his workbench.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
And what's the wear-lifetime of a such a small device? And how does a "microrobot" mean that we're "one step closer to a nanorobot"? The article makes no such claim, and such an extraordinary decrease in size--at least factor a billion in terms of volume--is so dramatic it boggles the mind that it was even suggested. Let me give a good idea about the feasibility of "nanorobots": nature has been shrinking critters for /billions/ of years, look to their level of functionality, i.e. what does a bacterium do? what does a virus do? what does a prion do? to get an idea of what "nanorobots" would be capable of.
OK - They are 60 x 250 micrometers or .000060 x .000250 meters, so you get 66,666,666.66 of them per m^2. If you include the entire playing field (w/ end zones) an NFL football field is 360 ft. x 160 ft. or 57,600 ft^2 or ~5,351.215 m^2. So there are (if I haven't messed anything up!) ~356,747,673,600 (I carried the calculations at full precision and rounded the result, so your results might not be exactly the same as mine). I leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate the number required for other sizes of fields.
The fact that there are so many typos (as ridiculed above) or the fact that Suicidegirls posted this news topic hours before /. did.
(or the fact that I know SG posted this before /.)
They brought Microsoft Office Clippey alive!? aaaaaaaah!
Table-ized A.I.
Bite my tiny metal ass!