No single termite can alter a landscape. No single firefly can generate the synchronized lights shown during summer evening displays.
However, when small creatures collectively act together, their individual efforts can accumulate to produce something significantly greater than if each acted individually.
Can similar behaviors be produced in micro-robots? Not just sense their surroundings, but also respond to them so that they could collectively affect them?
The most current micro-robotic system shows they can.
The real question was whether they could work together
Micro-robots have been getting progressively better in recent years, with some even capable of communicating with each other.
However, until recently, there has still been a limitation on what the combinations of these functions could collectively accomplish.
A research team at Cornell University has taken multiple prior developments and brought them together. The result is a group of 54 micro-robotic paddle units that function as a single coordinated system rather than as separate units.
Each of the paddle units performs only a very limited amount of work on its own.
The objective was to determine the impact when dozens of these units started working together.
That was only part of what made them different
This achievement is somewhat interesting when compared with the accomplishments of earlier generations of micro-robotic systems.
Many earlier micro-robotic systems could both sense environmental changes and react accordingly.
The new generation of micro-robots represents a departure from the reactive relationship they had with their environment.
Instead of merely reacting to their environment, the new generation of micro-robots can actually modify it.
The greatest challenge to date has been developing a method that enables a number of micro-machines to collaborate to produce meaningful influences upon their operating environments.
Everything changed once they stopped acting alone
Cooperation is the key to the breakthrough. A single micro-paddle has minimal capacity to affect its operating environment.
Therefore, the 54 micro-paddles were synchronized into a coordinated array. Together, the paddles can sense temperature and respond collectively, a system developed by Cornell University.
Upon detecting environmental condition changes, the paddles distribute fluid toward warmer or cooler locations.
Collectively, the micro-robotic paddles enable the creation of influences upon their environment which none of the individual machines alone could create.
Moving water wasn’t the most important result
What makes this capability significant is not the actual movement of the water itself. The results were reported in Nature Electronics.
What matters more is that the use of the micro-robots produces a feedback loop between the micro-robots and their operating environment.
The robots first measure environmental conditions and then respond to those conditions by modifying them using their coordinated fluid distribution. Those modifications may then impact the environment that the robots will experience next time.
Unlike being mere observers of their operating environments, the micro-robots participate in modifying, and thus controlling, their environments.
Nature had already solved a similar problem
Examples already exist in nature showing how this type of coordination can operate across scales.
Groups of cilia help living organisms swim, eat, and manipulate fluids throughout their environment. The robotic paddles draw inspiration from that same kind of biological cooperation.
The combined contribution of relatively insignificant individual components results in outputs that exceed by orders of magnitude those that any single component could possibly provide independently.
Now imagine what happens when the system becomes more capable
At present, the micro-robots only respond to temperature. Future iterations could potentially respond to additional environmental cues, such as light intensity or changes in pH level.
Rather, creating micro-robotic systems that can operate cooperatively, adapt to changing conditions, and shape their operating environments in beneficial ways is the larger long-term vision.
Medicine and agricultural science are among the areas where such capabilities could eventually prove valuable.
This represents an initial demonstration of what becomes possible when many tiny machines begin acting as part of a collective entity instead of as isolated individual entities.
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