Also provided below are movies of our MEMS devices and MEMS microrobots. The devices, and what you see in the movies, are described in our papers, which are available online, and, somewhat more telegraphically, on these webpages.
An Untethered, Electrostatic, Globally-Controllable MEMS Micro-Robot
Supplementary
material and videos are available for the following papers:
We present a steerable, electrostatic, untethered, MEMS
micro-robot, with dimensions of 60 µm by 250 µm by 10 µm. This
micro-robot is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude smaller in size than
previous micro-robotic systems. The device consists of a curved,
cantilevered steering arm, mounted on an untethered scratch drive
actuator. These two components are fabricated monolithically from the
same sheet of conductive polysilicon, and receive a common power and
control signal through a capacitive coupling with an underlying
electrical grid. All locations on the grid receive the same power and
control signal, so that the devices can be operated without knowledge
of their position on the substrate and without constraining rails or
tethers.
Supplementary material is available for the paper: B. R. Donald, C. Levey, C. McGray, I. Paprotny, and D. Rus, "An Untethered, Electrostatic, Globally-Controllable MEMS Micro-Robot", Journal of Micro-Electromechanical Systems, 2006; 15(1): 1-15. [Supplementary material]