Northwestern engineers invent the world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robots

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Engineers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, invented the world’s smallest remote-controlled walking robot, according to research published in the journal Science Robotics. His team was comprised of students across varying academic levels who combined critical- and creative-thinking skills to design robots that looked like crabs as well as other animals like inchworms and crickets, he said. The crab stays standing on its legs until the heat from lasers are used to get the crab to move, Rogers said. A promising future The robots are still in the developmental phase and primarily created for academic purposes, but the technology used to make the tiny crabs have potential, Rogers said.