A tiny crabby robot gets its scuttling orders from lasers

“There’s quite a bit of interest these days in tiny robots—small-scale structures that can be controlled remotely for various purposes. I think there’s a vision that they could be useful in surgical operations or for diagnostic purposes in the context of clinical medicine,” says John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, and an author on the paper. “What we’ve tried to do is put forward some ideas in terrestrial robots of that type that can add to the portfolio of capabilities that are developing in this emerging area of research.”