WMicrobotics is the field of miniature robotics, in particular mobile robots with characteristic dimensions less than 1 mm. The term can also be used for robots capable of handling micrometer size components.
WThe Alice is a very small "sugarcube" mobile robot (2x2x2cm) developed at the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland between 1998 and 2004. It has been part of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS) at ETH Zurich since 2006.
WThe DelFly is a fully controllable camera-equipped flapping wing Micro Air Vehicle or Ornithopter developed at the Micro Air Vehicle Lab of the Delft University of Technology in collaboration with Wageningen University.
WThe e-puck is a small (7 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot. It was originally designed for micro-engineering education by Michael Bonani and Francesco Mondada at the ASL laboratory of Prof. Roland Siegwart at EPFL. The e-puck is open hardware and its onboard software is open-source, and is built and sold by several companies.
WThe Khepera is a small (5.5 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot that was developed at the LAMI laboratory of Professor Jean-Daniel Nicoud at EPFL in the mid 1990s. It was developed by Edo. Franzi, Francesco Mondada, André Guignard and others.
WThe PocketDelta Robot is a microrobot based on a parallel structure called "Delta robot". It has been designed to perform micro-assembly tasks where high-speed and high-precision are needed in a reduced working space. The robot's size is 120×120×200 mm offering a workspace diameter up to 150mm × 30mm.
WRoboBee is a tiny robot capable of partially untethered flight, developed by a research robotics team at Harvard University. The culmination of twelve years of research, RoboBee solved two key technical challenges of micro-robotics. Engineers invented a process inspired by pop-up books that allowed them to build on a sub-millimeter scale precisely and efficiently. To achieve flight, they created artificial muscles capable of beating the wings 120 times per second.
WThe s-bot is a small (15 cm) differential wheeled mobile robot developed at the LIS at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland between 2001 and 2004. Targeted to swarm robotics, a field of artificial intelligence, it was developed within the Swarm-bots project, a Future and Emerging Technologies project coordinated by Prof. Marco Dorigo. Built by a small team of engineers of the group of Prof. Dario Floreano and with the help of student projects, it is considered at the time of completion as one of the most complex and featured robots ever for its size. The s-bot was ranked on position 39 in the list of “The 50 Best Robots Ever” by the Wired magazine in 2006.