Small-Scale Robotics : An Introduction
The term small-scale robotics describes a wide variety of miniature robotic systems, ranging from millimeter sized devices down to autonomous mobile systems with dimensions measured in nanometers. Unified by the common goal of enabling applications that r
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1 University of Illinois, Chicago IL 60607, USA University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA
Abstract. The term small-scale robotics describes a wide variety of miniature robotic systems, ranging from millimeter sized devices down to autonomous mobile systems with dimensions measured in nanometers. Unified by the common goal of enabling applications that require tiny mobile robots, research in small-scaled robotics has produced a variety of novel miniature robotic systems in the last decade. As the size of the robots scale down, the physics that governs the mode of operation, power delivery, and control change dramatically, restricting how these devices operate, and requiring novel engineering solutions to enable their functionality. This chapter provides an overview and introduction to small-scale robotics, drawing parallels to systems presented later in the book. Comparison to biological systems is also presented, using biology to speculate regarding future capabilities of robotic systems at the various size scales.
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Introduction
The term small-scale robotics is used to describe smaller-than-conventional robotic systems, ranging from several millimeters to nanometers in size. Research in small-scale robotic systems is unified by the common goal of developing autonomous robotic machines for applications that require the individual robotic units to be of small (millimeters or smaller) size. Applications for such robots are numerous, including areas such as medicine, manufacturing, or search and rescue. However, robots at these scales must overcome many challenges related to their fabrication, control, and power delivery. This chapter provides a brief summary of the ongoing research in small-scale robotics, outlining some of the challenges related to development and implementation of robotic systems at these different scales. The following chapters of this book show several example implementations of selected small-scale robotic systems. They include selected papers based on presentations from the workshop “The Different Sizes of Small-Scale Robotics: from Nano-, to Millimeter-Sized Robotic Systems and Applications,” which was held in conjunction with the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2013), in May 2013 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Richard Feynman was perhaps the first to mention the idea of small-scale (non-mobile) robots in his 1959 lecture, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” in which he described the possibility of tiny hands building even tinier hands [1]. Feynman followed this up with a lecture in 1983 titled “Infinitesimal Machinery” in which he mentioned the possibility of mobile small-scale robots for the first I. Paprotny and S. Bergbreiter (Eds.): Small-Scale Robotics 2013, LNAI 8336, pp. 1–15, 2014. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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I. Paprotny and S. Bergbreiter
time [2]. He even proposed ideas for application of these robots including medical procedures and a game in which a millirobot could be used to fight a paramecium. This decade coincided with the devel
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