MEMS Fiber Crawler

Pushing, walking, jumping, and flying microrobots have been demonstrated. Other previous work has demonstrated microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) capable of creating silicon silk, as well as microrobots capable of assembling millimeter-scale carbon fibers. However, microrobots capable of manipulating very small diameter filaments, fibers, and wires initially external to themselves is still an area of open research. We have successfully demonstrated a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MEMS device capable of pushing a 7 um diameter carbon filament through an adjustable width channel at speeds of 10um/s to 0.2 mm/s. Future applications include an array of individually addressable neural electrode implanters, a microrobotic spider, a wound or fabric stitching microrobot, plug-and-play linear servos for paper robots, etc.