Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots
(PhysOrg.com) -- Tiny robots the size of a flea could one day be mass-produced, churned out in swarms and programmed for a variety of applications, such as surveillance, micromanufacturing, medicine, cleaning, and more. In an effort to reach this goal, a recent study has demonstrated the initial tests for fabricating microrobots on a large scale.
Images of the robots showing their size proportional to various objects. Image credit: Edqvist, et al.
I-SWARM Project
This project combines all: micro-robotics, distributed and adaptive systems as well as self-organising biological swarm systems. It is a technological advance to facilitate the mass-production of micro-robots, which can then be employed as a “real” swarm consisting of more than 100 micro-robot clients. These clients will all be equipped with limited, so-called pre-rational on-board intelligence. The swarm will consist of a huge number of heterogeneous robots, differing in the type of sensors, manipulators and computational power. Such a robot swarm is expected to accomplish a variety of applications and to perform different strategies. With the realisation of three bio-inspired basic scenarios, the swarm will be able to perform dispersion, aggregation and collective perception.
The functions of the agents is reduced to locomotion, integrated tool (one per agent) for permitting basic manipulation and to attach and release other agents, a limited capability to store state information of the agent as well as the possibility to transfer basic information from agent to agent via light.
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The aim of the I-SWARM project is the realisation of a “real” micro-robot swarm. More than one hundred micro-manufactured autonomous robots will be able for the collective execution of different tasks in the small world. This is achieved by:
- by the realisation of collective intelligence of these robots
- in terms of co-operation and
- collective perception
- using knowledge and methods of pre-rational intelligence, machine learning, swarm theory and classical multi-
agent systems
- by the development of advanced micro-robot hardware
- being extremely small (size of a single robot: 3 x 3 x 2 mm3)
- by integrating novel actuators for locomotion, miniaturised powering with micro solar cells and miniaturised
wireless communication
- with ICs for on-board intelligence and
- an integrated sensor and tool for the manipulation in the small world.
Sources:- Researchers Hope to Mass-Produce Tiny Robots
- YouTube - I-SWARM Project
- I-Swarm
- YouTube - I-Swarm Micro Robot
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