UTArlington - The University of Texas at Arlington Magazine

Robotics Revolution

With their surveillance, crowd-control, and intelligence-gathering skills, the tiny robots that UT Arlington researchers are inventing and mass-producing could transform the defense industry.

The slight crea­ture scur­ry­ing through the leaves pauses. It darts left to avoid a fallen branch, flat­tens itself to crawl under yet another branch, them clam­bers over a pile of refuse before hes­i­tat­ing, as if test­ing the air. Or scout­ing an enemy. Or both.

As small as it is—smaller and lighter than a deck of cards with legs—it is trans­port­ing even smaller crea­tures that will soon power up and fan out, test­ing water and air, lis­ten­ing and watch­ing, per­haps cling­ing to any­thing that moves and com­mu­ni­cat­ing its loca­tion. Maybe they’ll be weapons, going where no per­son could safely go. They may see in the dark, hear in the silence.

Clearly these are not bio­log­i­cal crea­tures, though they can emu­late bio­log­i­cal forms by walk­ing and pos­si­bly swim­ming and fly­ing. No, they’re micro­ro­bots, essen­tially sen­sors of all kinds but with a handy capac­ity. They can move, take orders, com­mu­ni­cate. They can func­tion in harsh envi­ron­ments. Best of all, they’re cheap and expend­able, per­haps even self-destructing when their use­ful­ness ends.

And their future is almost now at UT Arlington’s Texas Micro­fac­tory, a com­po­nent of the Col­lege of Engineering’s Automa­tion and Robot­ics Research Insti­tute (ARRI) in Fort Worth. The Texas Micro­fac­tory is a global leader in devel­op­ing microsys­tems, one com­po­nent of which is tiny robotic devices that can be mass-manufactured.

Lead­ing the inter­dis­ci­pli­nary effort are half a dozen sci­en­tists and grad­u­ate stu­dents who com­bine forces in robot­ics, microtech­nol­ogy, and even chem­istry to make what ARRI Direc­tor Harry Stephanou calls “flea-sized robots.”

‘FLEA’ MARKET

Dr. Stephanou believes microsys­tems will be a major U.S. indus­try, cre­at­ing tens of thou­sands of jobs. The Defense Depart­ment has invested almost $11 mil­lion in microsys­tems at ARRI, with more likely to come.

“Our defense-oriented work includes research and appli­ca­tions related to swarms of small robots,” Stephanou says. “These can be used for sur­veil­lance, for crowd con­trol and dis­per­sal, intel­li­gence gath­er­ing, or many other functions.”

Micro­ro­bot­ics spe­cial­ist Moham­mad Mayyas, a fac­ulty asso­ciate researcher at ARRI, says the micro­fac­tory has almost per­fected the larger devices. “Now we’re work­ing on ways to make tinier and more flex­i­ble robots for real-world applications.”

Here’s a quick les­son in micro­ro­botic basics. First, micro­ro­bots come with two mechan­i­cal styles, dis­crete and con­tin­u­ous. Dis­crete mod­els tend to be “bigger”—a few cen­time­ters long—with mechan­i­cal parts like legs or wheels, tiny motors, and bat­ter­ies. Con­tin­u­ous mod­els are usu­ally smaller and man­u­fac­tured in what appears to be a sin­gle piece, though in fact they are com­pos­ite struc­tures folded into techno-origamis. Their power may come from acoustic or radio waves since they’re too small to carry batteries.

Sec­ond, think of micro­ro­bots in three sizes. The first are mea­sured in cen­time­ters. The microfactory’s two cen­time­ter mod­els are called “Star­bot” and “Casper.” Star­bot walks with a unique leg sys­tem; Casper essen­tially rolls. Two micro­fac­tory devices in the sec­ond group are mea­sured in mil­lime­ters and are made through mold­ing, stamp­ing, fold­ing, and assem­bling. They look some­what insect-like, which is why they’re named “ARRI­pede” and “Flea.” The small­est devices are mea­sured in micrometers—a human hair is about 150 micrometers—and the microfactory’s two mod­els have been labeled “µTags” and “Vibrobot.”

“We think we’re less than a year away from hav­ing man­u­fac­turable mod­els of the cen­time­ter size, two years or fewer from the mil­lime­ter size, and per­haps five years from the microm­e­ter mod­els,” Stephanou says. “But extra fund­ing could speed up that process.”

For Stephanou and the micro­fac­tory team, man­u­fac­turable is a key word.

“So often there’s a dis­con­nect between aca­d­e­mic research and the real­i­ties of man­u­fac­tur­ing. Just because you can make some­thing in a lab that works doesn’t mean you can quickly and cheaply turn out 100 or 500 or 1,000 or more units. Our empha­sis isn’t just on research­ing micro­ro­bot­ics. We focus on how to make them and many other microsys­tems a viable industry.”

BEYOND PROTOTYPES

Stephanou’s tech­no­log­i­cal Holy Grail is con­vert­ing ARRI’s spe­cial­ized niche into a real-world eco­nomic devel­op­ment dri­ver for Texas and the nation.

“We want to cre­ate jobs,” he says. “The way to cre­ate jobs is to build the econ­omy of the future. The microsys­tems indus­try is the way to cre­ate tens of thou­sands of jobs. Aca­d­e­mic research and devel­op­ment is won­der­ful from a sci­ence stand­point, but it doesn’t tell us what indus­try needs in the way of microrobotics.”

What’s needed, he says, is “very clear.”

“They need to move from chips to work­ing devices and from there to col­lec­tions of devices, or sys­tems. That first jump typ­i­cally accounts for 85 per­cent of the cost of the devices.”

In short, say ARRI team mem­bers Woo Ho Lee and Rakesh Murthy, indus­try wants actual man­u­fac­tur­ing processes—the abil­ity to make the tiny robots on a kind of assem­bly line.

“Our goal is not only to cre­ate prod­ucts but also the tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate the prod­ucts,” Dr. Murthy says. “It’s what’s called con­cur­rent engineering.”

The lab­o­ra­to­ries at the Texas Micro­fac­tory are doing just that, pro­duc­ing micro­ma­chin­ing mod­ules oper­at­ing in clean rooms that can turn out the lit­tle robots in big num­bers. And some­times very economically.

“Some­times the tools and devices needed to do this don’t exist in the mar­ket­place,” Murthy says. “So we have to either make them or mod­ify exist­ing products.”

The idea is to cre­ate micro­ma­chin­ing mod­ules that become assem­bly lines uti­liz­ing as many exist­ing com­po­nents as pos­si­ble. This abil­ity to cre­ate com­mer­cially viable man­u­fac­tur­ing sys­tems is a crit­i­cal dis­tinc­tion for ARRI and the microfactory.

“We dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves because we have a chain from inno­va­tion to research and devel­op­ment, pro­to­typ­ing, and pilot pro­duc­tion,” Stephanou says. “There’s no other uni­ver­sity that I have ever seen—even in Ger­many where they’re good at this sort of thing—that includes pilot production.”

For exam­ple, a com­pany might have devel­oped a pro­to­type in the lab and now wants to make batches of 100, or 1,000, or 10,000.

“They look around and say, ‘Where do we buy the equip­ment for the actual man­u­fac­tur­ing?’ ” Stephanou says. “For this kind of tech­nol­ogy, the answer often is that the equip­ment does not exist. And they don’t have a process to make it exist. We do. That’s the value in what we’re doing. We can make such projects viable.”

Micro­fac­tory engi­neers are build­ing machines—manufacturing modules—that can cre­ate micro­ro­bots at the nano, micron, and mil­lime­ter levels.

“The micron level seems to be the sweet spot with the great­est demand right now,” Stephanou says. “Our spe­cialty is that we can pro­duce small runs of devices or prod­ucts for pri­vate com­pa­nies or government.”

If a com­pany wants to develop 500 units—or 2,000—the micro­fac­tory can develop the process and pro­duce the device, such as tiny robots that can carry all kinds of payloads.

When think­ing about microsys­tems, Stephanou believes that it’s crit­i­cal to remain “tech­no­log­i­cally agnostic.”

“All too often, sci­en­tists or researchers become fix­ated on one tech­nol­ogy or mate­r­ial or another,” he says. “We try to go with what works. If that means using sil­i­con or glass or poly­mers or metals—molding, stamp­ing, and folding—that’s what we’ll do. There’s no one-technology-fits-all when it comes to mak­ing tiny robots or other microsystems.”

He believes UT Arling­ton is set­ting the pace.

“We’re only just now scratch­ing the sur­face of what has enor­mous eco­nomic poten­tial. In my view, we aren’t just one of the front-runners. We are the world uni­ver­sity leader in man­u­fac­turable microsystems.”

More in Features »