The little piece shown in the picture is an extremely tiny robot, a micro-bot, which could be the smallest autonomous untethered robot ever created. It weighs less than 1 ounce and measures only 1/4 cubic inch in total volume. In short, it “turns on a dime and parks on a nickelâ€.
There are lots of usefulness with the extremely tiny bot, as it can be used to explore hidden areas that human can’t reach, such as scrambling through pipes or prowling around buildings looking for chemical plumes or human movement (Oh I see, it can’t be a tiny spy too).
This tiny robot is being developed Sandia National Labs. It’s equipped with an 8K ROM processor, temperature sensor, miniature video cameras, microphones, and chemical micro-sensors all packed into its super tiny body. The power source is by three watch batteries. And the speed of traveling is 20 inches per minute. This micro-bot could be the smallest in the world, but the developer claims that they’re planning for developing smaller models. Anyway, this tiny piece reminds me the termibots that we’ve seen before, which are used to go to human-unreachable spots for fighting termites.
via [gEarFuSe]
September 30th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
[...] This mini-robot developed by is not very fast, not very agile, but he’s so small – it’s kinda cute. As far as I know he might be the smallest autonomous robot ever made. If the developer succedes in making him faster, he might end up very useful. [...]
January 5th, 2010 at 4:43 am
Small robot for sure. One quarter cubic inch? No. At least not the bot in the picture, which is sitting on a U.S. quarter and overhanging it at the back side of the robot. Parked fully on the quarter, it would clearly be the size of a quarter in length. That’d make it about an inch long. Multiply by the height (apparently almost the same as its’ length) and you get one cubic inch MINIMUM! Pisses me off as it’s a techy object and not nearly represented accurately.