Intelligence for miniature robots

It seems clear that small robots which take advantage of recent reductions in packaging size and costs of microelectronics can potentially be very useful; even more so if similar savings could be achieved in the actuation and power supply areas. Typically, the computational power required in a robotic system that connects perception to action is enormous, but if the organization of the sensors, actuators and computing elements is carefully laid out, the actual silicon area required for the intelligence system becomes quite small. A viable avenue of pursuit, then, is to aim towards scaling down the rest of the subsystems in a robot to the same scale as the control system, integrating motors, sensors, computation and power supplies onto a single piece of silicon; the advantages being mass productibility, lower costs and the avoidance of the usual connector problems encountered in combining discrete subsystems. By rethinking implementation strategies with this new form of robotic technology (i.e., the application of many very small robots), it may be possible to solve many problems more cost effectively, albeit in novel ways.

As the completely integrated robot faces many technology hurdles, it seems necessary to focus on just one or two of the problem areas at a time. It turns out that many of the cost-saving benefits still accrue at small, but macroscopic scales. This paper describes an exercise of building a complete system, aimed at being as small as possible, but using off the shelf components exclusively. The result is an autonomous mobile robot slightly larger than one cubic inch, which incorporates sensing, actuation, onboard computation and on-board power supplies. Nicknamed Squirt, this robot acts as a ‘bug’, hiding in dark corners and venturing out in the direction of last heard noises, only moving after the noises are long gone.