VIDEO: THIS TINY ROBOT ARM PICKS, PACK AND PERFORMS SURGERY ON THE MICROSCALE

Harvard engineers have developed the world's smallest version of the ubiquitous bot, dubbed the MiliDelta. As its name suggests, the new robot measures just a few millimetres, and could lend a hand in precise picking, packing, manufacturing and even surgery on the micro scale.

In 2011, the team at Harvard's Wyss Institute developed a flatpack fabrication technique for tiny robots, which they call pop-up microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing. Over the past few years, the researchers put the idea into action to make a self-assembling crawling robot and the agile Robobee. The MiliDelta is the latest and smallest creation to be made using this approach, allowing the team to quickly iterate on the design until it reached the final version.

"The physics of scaling told us that bringing down the size of Delta robots would increase their speed and acceleration, and pop-up MEMS manufacturing with its ability to use any material or combination of materials seemed an ideal way to attack this problem," says Robert Wood, lead engineer on the Wyss team.

The MiliDelta could eventually mimic the applications of its bigger siblings and find use in picking and packing tiny objects, such as electronics components or cells in research labs. The mini robot nailed its first experiment, where it was tested as a device for cancelling out human hand tremors.

"We first mapped the paths that the tip of a toothpick circumscribed when held by an individual, computed those, and fed them into the milliDelta robot, which was able to match and cancel them out," says Fatma Zeynep Temel, co-first author of the study.

The MiliDelta can be seen in action in the video below.