![]() “These innovations may someday lead to nano-Roomba-type robots that can clean bacterial infection from human tissue, micro-factories that can transform manufacturing, and robotic surgical instruments that are ten times smaller than current devices,” Professor Cohen said. They are currently working to integrate their shape memory actuators with circuits to make walking robots with foldable legs as well as sheet-like robots that move by undulating forward. Now, they hope to capture another record with a new self-folding origami bird that is only 60 microns wide. ![]() The authors have already been recognized by Guinness World Records for creating the smallest walking robot. “They bend to the smallest radius of curvature of any electrically controlled microactuator (500 nm), are fast (less than 100-millisecond operation), and operate inside the electrochemical window of water, avoiding bubble generation associated with oxygen evolution.” “They function by the electrochemical oxidation/reduction of a platinum surface, creating a strain in the oxidized layer that causes bending,” the researchers said. And they only need a single volt to be powered to life. They can also flatten and refold themselves thousands of times. The machines fold themselves fast, within 100 milliseconds. “And this is what we’ve done with this shape memory actuator that you can drive with voltage and make it hold a bent shape.” “The hard part is making the materials that respond to the CMOS circuits,” he added. “Imagine a million fabricated microscopic robots releasing from a wafer that fold themselves into shape, crawl free, and go about their tasks, even assembling into more complicated structures. “So that means you need to have appendages that are driven by complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) transistors, basically a computer chip on a robot that’s 100 microns on a side.” “We want to have robots that are microscopic but have brains on board,” said Professor Itai Cohen, a researcher in the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid-State Physics and the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science at Cornell University. Microscale origami duck transforming from a flat sheet and holding its 3D shape.
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