Scientists have just squeezed a working computer, sensors, and a propulsion system into a robot the size of a grain of salt — and the implications reach far beyond the lab. A research team from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan built fully autonomous microscopic machines measuring roughly 200 × 300 × 50 micrometers — about the size of a speck of salt. Each device costs roughly a penny to make, can swim through liquid, sense temperature changes to within about 0.33°C (0.6°F), make decisions on its own, and operate for months on end. Importantly, these robots are untethered: no wires, magnets, or external joysticks. Everything — processor, memory, sensors, power and propulsion — is packed into a package almost too small to see unaided. The breakthrough tackles a problem that has blocked robotics under one millimeter for decades. At that scale, water feels like tar and tiny mechanical limbs break easily, so the team abandoned conventional moving parts. Instead, the robots propel themselves by creating an electric field that nudges charged particles in the surrounding liquid; those ions drag water molecules, producing motion. With no moving parts, the electrodes are robust enough to be transferred between samples with a micropipette without damage. Power comes from LED light hitting on-board solar cells that output roughly 75 nanowatts. To operate on so little energy, the Michigan team designed circuits that run at extremely low voltages and cut power consumption by more than a thousandfold. The software had to be reimagined too: rather than long instruction streams, the researchers condensed complex behaviors into single, specialized commands that fit into ultra-small memory. The result is, according to the team, the first sub-millimeter robot that contains a complete computer — processing, memory and sensors — at this scale. Each robot can detect tiny temperature variations, move toward warmer regions, and even report temperature readings that could serve as proxies for cellular activity. To send data, the robots encode information in small movements — “wiggles” — that scientists decode through a microscope. “It’s like how honeybees communicate,” said David Blaauw, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan. Programming and addressing are done optically: light pulses both power the robots and load programs. Each device has a unique address, so researchers can give different instructions to different units. They can act independently or coordinate as swarms, moving in patterns like schools of fish at speeds up to one body length per second. The platform is cheap to fabricate and durable, and the researchers say it’s only the beginning: future versions could support more complex programs, new sensors, and tougher environments. “This is really just the first chapter,” said Marc Miskin, assistant professor at Penn Engineering. “We’ve shown that you can put a brain, a sensor, and a motor into something almost too small to see, and have it survive and work for months.” For crypto and Web3 audiences, the technology hints at new classes of distributed sensing and data provenance. Imagine massively parallel swarms that collect fine-grained environmental or biological readings and feed them into decentralized networks or oracles — where on-chain records could attest to where and when microscopic data was collected. Those possibilities remain speculative, but the combination of ultra-cheap, autonomous micro-robots and low-energy digital control opens fertile ground for future innovation at the intersection of hardware, data infrastructure, and blockchain-enabled trust. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news