Robots modelled on insects small & swift

Washington State University has developed two insect-like robots, a mini-bug and a water strider, which are the smallest, lightest and fastest fully-functional micro-robots ever. Reporting on their work in the proceedings of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, the mini-bug weighs in at 8 mg, while the water strider weighs 55 mg. “The actuators are the smallest and fastest ever developed for micro-robotics,” says Nestor O Perez-Arancibia, Flaherty Associate Professor in Engineering at WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, who led the project. In the case of the WSU robots, however, the actuators are made of two tiny shape memory alloy wires that are 1/1000 of an inch in diameter.