ESE Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Towards General Microscopic Robots”

This defense presents my contributions towards general robotics at the microscopic scale. Namely, through the introduction of fully programmable, autonomous microscopic robots free to explore the microscopic world. The robots complete simple, but essential milestones for microscopic robots. The machines we build are small enough to experience the same physics as their biological counterparts, allowing us to draw comparisons. Yet because our devices are built and understood by humans; we can control and comprehend their behavior. Thus, the lessons learned through deploying these small machines will fill in our understanding of the physics, living matter, and the relationship between the two.

This platform lays the foundation for general robotics at the microscopic scale. This is made possible through several constituent parts, including design decisions needed during circuitry layout of the robot array, fabrication steps that transform the custom microprocessors into robots, and the user-centered experimental setup needed to communicate with and control these robots. Through decades-long and tremendous efforts in global semiconductor fabrication, we can readily make computers with massive parallelization. My aim is to go beyond this reality – Can we build on top of complex circuitry to create fundamentally new systems? can it be done without harsh chemical waste?