Autonomous Jumping-Microrobots Essay

1.1 Background of the studyDespite their relative simplicity, modern day mobile robots capture the imagery by offering mobility in robust and controllable packages. Each of these robots is relatively large and works alone or requires a human operator. Science fictionalisation novels have long imagined very small robots working by themselves or in groups to do the same tasks of a larger robot, or even accomplishing jobs often larger robots would find impossible. In The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson describes microscopic robots used for surveillance and inherent in everyday life. A great deal of progress has been make in the decades since Feynmans speech, but microrobots still have a long way to go to reach the fantastic capabilities attributed to them in fictional works and Feynmans imagination. Even the term microrobot is not well defined.The autonomous mobile microrobots in this speech are defined as robots with dimensions on the order of millimeters and feature sizes on the orde r of microns. They carry power and control on-board for autonomy and their mobility allows them to move through a specified (and preferably arbitrary) environment. At this size, even mobility proves difficult. Ants and other insects can substantially crawl over obstacles, but it is much more difficult for robots to do so, even at larger size scales. To overcome the limitation of leg length, the microrobots of this dissertation are designed to jump over obstacles instead.