A ‘Fantastic Voyage’ in real-life bots

Every time University of Pennsylvania engineer Marc Miskin speaks about his research on miniature robots, someone asks the question: How does it compare to the submarine in “Fantastic Voyage”?

That’s the fanciful 1966 sci-fi movie in which a tiny vessel makes an emergency journey inside the brain of an injured scientist. The incredible answer: The real-life bots, which Miskin developed with former colleagues at Cornell University, are about the same size.

Roughly a quarter the size of a pixel on a standard computer screen, they are little squares of silicon with legs made from platinum and titanium, able to swim around inside your body and track vital signs.

At least someday, Miskin hopes. For now, they swim around on microscope slides in Miskin’s lab at Penn, where he started in January as an assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering. The bots are equipped with miniature solar cells, allowing Miskin to power them with laser light.

Miskin recently presented his research in Boston at a conference of the American Physical Society. He designed the robots at Cornell as a postdoctoral researcher, working with colleagues Itai Cohen, Paul McEuen and Alejandro Cortese.

A million robots can be made from one 4-inch wafer of silicon using techniques adapted from the semiconductor industry, Miskin said at a news conference. They are so cheap to make — a fraction of a penny each — that he thinks of them like chemicals or medicines.

“It’s a fundamentally different kind of robot,” he said. “You can throw them away.”

Other scientists who have heard presentations by team members are impressed.

Producing a three-dimensional device at that scale is a challenge, said David Gracias, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He likened the manufacturing techniques used by the Penn-Cornell team to a very small-scale version of origami — the Japanese art of paper folding. But he cautioned more work would be needed to improve control of individual robots and track their location.