miniaturization – Impact Lab

DARPA, Engineering, new technology, Robots

DARPA’s insect-sized SHRIMP robots could aid disaster relief

July 22, 2018

Meet the tiny, versatile robots built to navigate high-risk environments.

DARPA’s efforts to propel military technology forward often manifest in a diverse fashion, spanning everything from drone submarine development to a biostasis program that aims to buy more time to rescue soldiers on the battlefield. The SHRIMP program, short for SHort-Range Independent Microrobotic Platforms, is another potentially life-saving initiative that is being designed to navigate through hazardous natural disaster zones.

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cutting edge, Engineering, IBM, Science & Technology News

IBM unveils ‘world’s smallest computer’ with blockchain at Think 2018

March 26, 2018

If there’s one downside to powerful computers, it’s that they’re too damn big.

Luckily, that’s about to change. At least, if IBM has anything to say about it.

March 19 is the first day of IBM Think 2018, the company’s flagship conference, where the company will unveil what it claims is the world’s smallest computer. They’re not kidding: It’s literally smaller than a grain of salt.

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Automation, Engineering, Nanotechnology

Tiny robots serve as programmable molecular assembly machines

October 2, 2017

September 23, 2017 – If you can make a robot small enough and then give it an arm like the Canadarm on the International Space Station, could you have it build things a molecule at a time? That’s the challenge that scientists at The University of Manchester decided to accept, and voila, the result, a robot a mere one-millionth of a millimeter in size that is programmable, can move and has a tiny robotic arm. They published their results in the September 20, 2017, edition of the journal Nature in an article entitled, “Stereodivergent synthesis with a programmable molecular machine.”

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