Designing a swarm of fully autonomous, submillimeter-sized robots sounds like an expensive, if not impossible task. However, a team at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan not only built a new generation of recordbreaking, solar powered machines. Each robot costs only a single penny to manufacture. The robots could help advance everything from nanotechnology manufacturing to medical research. And according to University of Pennsylvania engineer Marc Miskin, their team’s breakthrough also ends a decades’ long robotics conundrum.
“Building robots that operate independently at sizes below one millimeter is incredibly difficult,” he said in a university profile. “The field has essentially been stuck on this problem for 40 years.”
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