NRI: Electronically Integrated Microscopic Robot Swarms

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

The dream of microrobot swarms has been around for decades in nanoscience, robotics and science fiction. Built like semiconductor electronics, such robots could be made millions at a time, each costing just fractions of a penny. Swarms of these tiny machines could work together to carry out useful tasks like assembling circuits from prefabricated electronic components, repairing microscale cracks in materials, or potentially healing the body at its smallest scales. For decades this vision has been unrealized, but 50 years of Moore’s law scaling have resulted in an amazing miniaturization of electronic components and systems raising the possibility that microscale robot swarms may finally be within reach. This award supports work towards building the first swarm of electronically controlled, programmable robots, each one ten times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. As each machine is mass-manufactured and can be reprogramed, this research takes a major step towards an affordable system that enables new researchers or industry partners to manipulate the microworld with precision and control. This project sets the goal of a robot swarm with 10,000 programmable agents, each no larger than a few hundred microns on a side. That is, the research team aims to shrink the size of the smallest programmable robot ten-fold and to simultaneously make a swarm with ten times more agents than the state of the art. To reach these scales, the team pursues several innovations in circuits, robotics, and nanofabrication that address the fundamental constraints on propulsion, memory, and communication that arise from microscale physics. First, the research team plans to leverage concepts from lubrication theory to make robots that walk quickly and turn reliably in viscous fluids, despite the low frictional forces associated with low mass locomotion. For precise localization and organization, the team will develop hardware schemes based on global beacon sensing and communication strategies where robots drive and detect electrochemistry in the surrounding fluid environment. Finally, the swarm algorithms specially tailored to address the extreme memory constraints of programmable microscale machines will be developed. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.