We've been able to take solace in the fact that we'll see them coming, until today. A remote control robot crab that is so small it can crawl along the edge of a penny was built by researchers from the University.
It's not a new idea to make tinyrobots, which have been popular in science fiction for decades, and which can navigate inside living creatures, either for exploratory purposes or for delivering drugs to specific parts of the body.
The robots are often designed to swim or simply drift through the fluids in the body. In a paper published yesterday in the Science Robotics journal, the researchers at the University of Chicago describe how they have built a robot that can be steered without wires or a physical connection, and that can scampers around on either a set of legs or other forms of locomotion.
The robot crab is half a millimeter wide and can move at half its body length in a second. One of the biggest advantages is that it can move about without being detected, as it is both so small and incredibly lightweight.
How did the researchers find electronics small enough to fit on a crab? They didn't. It uses a completely different approach to movement than Boston Dynamics. The crab is created from a shape-memory alloy that is shaped by a thin coating of glass applied during the manufacturing process, but returns to its original shape when heat is applied. Imagine if you pointed a hair dryer at your arm and it straightened it out. It bends again when it cools down.
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