Battery-Free Gram-Scale Microrobots: Designing Autonomy for Rolling, Jumping, Gliding, and Flying

In this talk, Kyle Johnson will present battery-free autonomous microrobots that can fly in the wind or drive independently on the ground using microwatts of energy harvested from light or radio waves. These mobile sensing platforms are expected to have transformative impact in applications ranging from agricultural monitoring and infrastructure inspection to locating sensor sources in hazardous industrial or extraterrestrial environments.

This work challenges the conventional assumption that locomotion is beyond the reach of battery-free robots, demonstrates several approaches for achieving autonomous operation in realistic application scenarios, and opens a discussion on the practicality of large-scale mobile sensor deployments in remote environments. Kyle will discuss how miniaturizing robots to the near-gram scale can significantly reduce their energy requirements, which when combined with electromechanical and structural innovations can enable autonomous battery-free mobility.

He will also explain how origami techniques were leveraged to create shape-changing “leaf-out” robots that can fly in the wind to disperse sensors, and how intermittent motion was used to enable battery-free robots that roll on the ground. Finally, Kyle will present preliminary work toward miniaturized helicopters and jumping robots.

Speaker: Kyle Johnson, University of Washington

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