NIST and IEEE Challenge for MagPieR

Date of publication: 8 October 2012 The Fastest Mobile Microrobots in the World R ecent advances in micro/nanotechnologies and microelectromechanical systems have enabled micromachined mobile agents. Highly dynamic mobile microrobots are believed to open the gate for various future applications. However, at the submillimeter scale, the adhesion effects dominate physics, especially in the air environment. Although many studies have been performed to avoid or reduce this effect, the sticking phenomena are still one of the biggest challenges in achieving highly dynamic micromobile robots. Subsequently, intrinsic challenges at the given scale (hundreds of micrometers) are the powering technique themselves. Although often designed from active materials, actuation may only be performed by means of various external fields that often require a lot of space around the scene. In this context, the National Insti-tute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the IEEE initiated an annual state-of-theart microrobotics chal-lenge, boosting the development of novel mobile agents with precise and highly dynamic propulsion mechanisms and controllability. During our first participation in this competition in 2010, the French team Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) proposed a magnetic and piezoelectric mobile microrobot called MagPieR, which dramatically enhanced the propulsion speed to 28 ms for the so-called 2-mm dash task. It literally cut the former By Ioan Alexandru Ivan, Gilgueng Hwang, Joel Agnus, Nicolas Chaillet, and Stéphane Régnier