RoBeetle

Overview

An 88 mg four-legged crawler that runs on methanol instead of a battery. A nickel-titanium wire coated with platinum heats up as methanol vapor burns on it without a flame, contracts, and moves the legs, while a sliding shutter cuts off the fuel until the wire cools, with no electronics involved. One tank lasts about two and a half hours, and Guinness lists it as the smallest liquid-fuelled robot. The catch is control, since it only crawls forward and cannot stop until the fuel runs out. Lab head Néstor Pérez-Arancibia was earlier a postdoc in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab, home of the RoboBee, and now runs the lab at Washington State University.