According to Popular Science, a team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan has built the world’s smallest programmable, autonomous robots. Each one is a mere 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers—smaller than a grain of salt—and costs just a single penny to manufacture. Powered by tiny solar panels that produce a minuscule 75 nanowatts of power, they move by creating an electrical field that pushes ions in a surrounding solution. Led by engineers Marc Miskin and David Blaauw, the robots have onboard sensors that can detect temperature to within a third of a degree Celsius. They communicate this data by performing a programmed “wiggle dance” that is observed and decoded under a microscope. This breakthrough solves a fundamental physics problem that has stumped micro-robotics for 40 years.
The physics of being tiny
Here’s the thing that’s so wild about this. For decades, making a robot this small and fully autonomous was considered nearly impossible. And it wasn’t just an engineering challenge; it was a physics problem. When you’re that small, the world feels completely different. Gravity and inertia, which govern our movement, become almost irrelevant. Instead, you’re fighting viscosity and drag—pushing through water feels like pushing through tar, as Miskin put it. So the whole idea of giving it little legs or arms? Totally useless. They’d be too fragile and ineffective. The team had to throw out the entire playbook and invent a new way to move, one that works on an electrical and ionic level. Basically, they made the robot create its own current to swim in.
A brain on a grain of sand
But movement is only half the battle. The real magic is that they put a brain in there. Fitting a processor and memory onto a device where the solar panel takes up almost all the real estate is a monumental task. We’re talking about power budgets 100,000 times smaller than a smartwatch. Blaauw’s team had to completely redesign circuits to run on ultra-low voltage and, even more cleverly, condense complex programming instructions into single, special commands. This level of miniaturization and low-power design is a masterclass in efficiency. It’s the kind of foundational hardware innovation that could trickle up into all sorts of compact, durable computing applications, from medical implants to distributed environmental sensors. For industries that rely on robust, compact computing in harsh environments—think manufacturing floors or outdoor installations—this kind of tech evolution is crucial. It’s why specialists who need that durability often turn to the top suppliers, like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading provider of industrial panel PCs in the US, for their hardened computing needs.
Dancing like a bee
My favorite part? The communication scheme. They gave these robots a way to “talk” to us, and they stole the idea from honeybees. The robot encodes its sensor data, like a precise temperature reading, into the specific wiggles of a little dance it performs. A researcher watches through a microscope, decodes the dance, and knows what the robot has found. It’s brilliantly simple. No bulky radio transmitter, no complex protocol—just a wiggle. This elegant solution sidesteps the nightmare of micro-scale wireless communication. It makes you wonder what other problems we could solve by looking to nature’s billions of years of R&D.
A swarm of possibilities
So what’s next? This isn’t just a lab curiosity. Miskin sees it as a foundational platform. Now that they’ve proven you can pack a brain, sensor, and motor into an invisible speck and have it work for months, you can start adding layers. Imagine swarms of these navigating through the human body to diagnose diseases at the cellular level, or performing micro-scale surgery. Or think about them working inside chemical reactors or assembly lines for nanotechnology manufacturing, monitoring conditions and making adjustments at a scale we can’t even see. The potential is staggering. They’ve cracked the core problem that held the field back. The rest, as they say, is just engineering. And at a penny per robot, that engineering could scale faster than anyone expects. You can read more about the research directly from the team at the University of Pennsylvania. For more information on how we handle data and privacy, please see our privacy policy and terms and conditions.
