Swarms of Solar-Powered Microbots On the Way

Mike writes to tell us that Inhabitat has an interesting article, complete with some pretty pictures, about a new solar-powered swarm robot that could be used to collect data and aid in surveillance. "These mini-robots are quite revolutionary, considering that they contain all that's necessary to collect data and relay it back using one single circuit board. In the past single-chip robots have presented significant design and manufacturing challenges due in part to the use of solder as an adhesive. These new microbots use conductive adhesive to attach the components to a double-sided flexible printed circuit board using surface mount technology. The circuit is then folded into thirds and wrapped around the ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). On top, a solar cell generates power for the robot and delivers 3.6 V to the unit, which is enough for it to walk. Locomotion is achieved via three vibrating legs, while a fourth horizontal vibrating leg is used as a touch sensor."

Comments

Re:Too simple to be able to do much

[EdZ]

They're already programmed at a particularly high level: they're swarm robots. Yout don;t give them instructions, you give them goals. Why would you want memory on board anyway when you can just broadcast it back to a central storage device? These are the sensor and manipulator portions of the swarm, they only NEED to sense and manipulate.

Some Cool Videos on Hizook.com

[Anonymous Coward]

Hizook.com has some cool videos showing the micro robots moving around. Worth checking out.

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/29/i-swarm-micro-robots-realized-impressive-full-system-integration