TEENY TINY BOTS

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Franken Do is the littlest Frankenbot of the bunch. But with small size comes loads of opportunities—to do more without being seen or caught.

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There are mini-bots in real life, too. They can do extraordinary things like Frankenbot Do does. There is one bot the size of your little fingernail. It is the world’s smallest flying robot called “RoboBee.” This bot bee is powered through a special structure with teeny electrodes. When they are powered up, the RoboBee moves slowly forward, like an inchworm. Then it flies with real wings! Researchers made artificial muscles that let RoboBee wings beat 120 times per second.

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Can you imagine a real-life swarm of RoboBees? Scientists think that this will be possible. These miniature flying bots will one day be able to perform tasks that can help research. This is part of a new field of study called “swarm robotics,” where a group of robots (of any size) come together to meet shared goals. Once in a swarm, a group of robots can communicate with each other. Some of the cool things a swarm of bots could do? RoboBees could be used for search and rescue duties or even to pollinate flowers just as a real bee would do.

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Things in mini-bot land have gotten so small, that now science is working on a molecular-sized nanobot. If a RoboBee is the size of a teeny fingernail, a molecular-sized bot is the size of…well, a molecule. But they still can build and do other tasks, sometimes programmed with a tiny robotic arm. A pile of billions of these miniscule robots is the size of a few grains of salt. That is small even for Frankenbot Do!

If you had the ability to trade places with a nanobot, what would you do and where do you think you would go?