Four-Legged Walking Robot Is Smaller Than an Ant's Face

A few years ago, we wrote about the tiniest little quadruped robot we'd ever seen--a mere 20 millimeters long, with a hip height of 5.6 mm and weight of about 1.6 gram. The designer, Ryan St. Pierre from Sarah Bergbreiter's lab at the University of Maryland, also showed us a picture of an even smaller version that weighed just 100 mg. "It's always a fun challenge to try to make robots as small as possible," he told us. "Currently, I am working on making a robot, of the same design, that would be 2.5 mm long, an order of magnitude smaller than the ones we presented at ICRA. Smaller robots can more easily go places that later robots can't, and having them in various sizes would increase their utility."