Speaker 0:  this robot is smaller than a coin, has no battery, and can still move, sense its surroundings, and transmit data. the breakthrough is not that it moves quickly. it absolutely does not. but that it can keep inching forward using tiny amounts of harvested light or deliberately supplied radio energy. the battery is usually the heaviest ticking clock inside a tiny robot. researchers at the university of washington removed that clock entirely and built a gram scale machine that can recharge itself from light, a move in short bursts, and report what it senses. the milli mobile has no battery, no camera, and no sense of urgency, but give it enough light, and this coin sized robot will slowly wander around measuring the world long after your phone has died. what do you think about this robot that never needs to be recharged, john?

Speaker 1:  this scares the crap out of me, but let me this is really cool. so imagine that, you're dropping thousands of tiny robots into a forest after a wildfire, inside a collapsed building after an earthquake, or even inside industrial equipment. so instead of carrying batteries that eventually die, these robots are simply, quote, unquote, eating energy that's already around them. sunlight, indoor lights, or even radio waves from wi fi routers, cell towers, or communication systems. and so because they continuously harvest energy from the environment, they can operate for extremely long periods without human in intervention. this is significant. and if they can scale this to large robots, that's gonna be the end of, or that's that's gonna be the end all be all. that's the that's the skynet. that's these that's these terminator robots. right? so it's significant because batteries have always been pretty much the biggest limitation for robotics as far as weights and maintenance and eventually failing. and so by eliminating or dramatically reducing the need for batteries, we're moving to a terminator future where millions of right now, not because these are tiny autonomous robots that quietly could quietly monitor infrastructure. they could collect scientific data. they could inspect dangerous environments or even perform medical tasks inside the human body, which is kinda cool, kinda creepy, which i love. and so i love this. i love that the core innovation here is we're talking about energy harvesting. so, they're using photovoltaic or solar energy from sunlight or rf electromagnetic energy emitted by wireless communication systems. and so the thing is this can't scale, at least not with the technology we have right now, because both sources provide relatively little power individually. and so the engineering challenge is making a robot that consumes even less power than it harvests. i think this is cool, scary, but what do you think about this, craig?

Speaker 0:  this is really cool, and the story is not tiny robot moves. small robots already exist. but this is an important combination of battery free power, onboard computation, autonomous steering, environmental sensing, wireless communication, and untethered movement as, you know, this thing is the university of western researchers created this milli mobile, roughly one centimeter square robot weighing under 1.1 grams. like you said, harvest, solar and rf energy, stores it in capacitors, moves through tiny pulses from vibration motors. it can sense light, temperature, humidity, make simple navigation decisions, and transmit data over bluetooth. so this matters because back like you meant, the batteries makes, sensor deployments expensive to maintain. but now if you can deploy these or a bunch of these depending on your environment, you can now sense, say, a much bigger area or whatnot. i remember when i was down at, i'm trying to remember, hp labs down in palo alto, and you had to sign all these agreements, but it's ages ago now. they had this little robot that ran through their server room that was fully automated that had this great big long temperature probe. so it determined the temperature at every point in the server room and adjusted all the acs and fans in real time. so now you start taking that down to the microscopic level or the centimeter level and think about you can get all these sensors. you can detect leaks in basements. you can detect, i don't know, a thousand different things at low, low to no cost, being deployed, and working forever. it sounds amazing. and you're right. it's scary when you start, to scale this up to a higher level. but, you know, once you get to hydrogen and nuclear and limitless power, then it doesn't really matter whether they're they have, this wireless battery capability or not, doesn't it? they're just gonna come for us. yeah.

Speaker 1:  so go ahead. oh, go ahead. no. you go ahead. nope. so most people, other than conspiracy theorists, might not realize that our environment is constantly filled with radio frequency energy. go crazy, you conspiracy theorists, about five g and covid and whatever. but we've got tons of like, there's tons of blue if you were to open up a, if you were to have a frequency wave, whatever it's called, and look at all the waves. like, there's tons around you. there's wi fi. there's bluetooth. there's cell. there's television. there's satellite. there's five g, and there's so much. there's even wireless energy now being broadcast, but not not in, like, their test environment. but, researchers are using this miniature antenna called a rectenna, which is a rectifying antenna to capture rf energy and convert it into alternating electromagnetic waves into direct current energy. and so, we're talking microwatts worth of power. but if the robot only requires microwatts to operate, well, then you've got continuous operation. right? think about this concept similar to rfid tags. so i don't know if you guys know this, but rfid tags work as using radio frequency. so the tag itself, when it's sitting there, is it's sitting there without doing anything. once it gets an rf signal, that's when it sends out the information from that tag itself. so it's a it's a little storage tag that has information that is readable or writable. once there is a signal that is, applied to it. so, there's a lot more engineering that's needed to happen here, like, better harvesting, and lower, power usage. but i'm excited for this, but also scared.

Speaker 0:  yeah. it's interesting. i love where we're going when we talk about low power because what else could we do with this? you know, in some practical applications, modern farms need constant day, data, soil, moisture, temperature, humidity, microclimate variations. a swarm of milli, mobile style robots could crawl, crawl across a field powered by sunlight, reporting temperature and humidity data back to a station. you could do that in greenhouses. industrial infrastructure and inspection, factories, railways, roads, bridges, all need regular inspection. manually walked by humans today. these could be done by milli mobile robots that are, passing the signals back, defense and battlefield sensing. so there's a lot to be done here, that could be used with this stuff. but we're still in the lab. these aren't fully deployable yet. the speeds are at 5.5 millimeters per second. maximum is very slow. navigation is complex. packet delivery at range and 9% delivery rate at 700 meters is usable for infrequent environmental sensing, but not support for time sensitive stuff. so there's a lot of things that has to improve, but i like it. i think it's cool, and i'm not really, scared of this. i think of it, like a wind up toy that winds itself, itself, one click at a time from the light in the room. not being able to wind up. just click click. so, you know, i think it's really cool.

Speaker 1:  yeah.

Speaker 0:  and, milli mobile proves that useful robot movement can happen on an energy budget previously associated with tiny sense stationary sensors. the next generation of robots may not charge faster. they may become patient enough to stop needing batteries. would you trust a swarm of nearly invisible robots to inspect your farm, factory, or city infrastructure? let us know in the thoughts below. in the comments below.