Fabricating Reprogrammable Solar Powered Microscopic Robots

We show progress towards programmable, autonomous microscopic robots. Each robot has sensors, memory, solar cells as power supplies and a microcontroller integrated together, all fabricated in low-power silicon electronics. Electrochemical actuators are fabricated on the electrical systems enabling locomotion and sensor readout. The custom microcontroller on each robot can be programmed by sending 11-bit instructions via optical signals to a receiver, allowing a user to define the robot's behavior. All the steps used to build these machines are carried out massively in parallel, allowing for swarms of tiny, programmable robots. Long term, we hope that programmability will enable a wide range of complex, user-customizable behaviors and new studies of locomotion or swarming at the microscale.