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Mark Miskin: This is a rotifer.
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It's a microorganism
about a hair's width in size.
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They live everywhere on earth --
saltwater, freshwater, everywhere --
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and this one is out looking for food.
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I remember the first time
I saw this thing,
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I was like eight years old
and it completely blew me away.
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I mean, here is this
incredible little creature,
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it's hunting, swimming,
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going about its life,
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but its whole universe fits
within a drop of pond water.
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Paul McEuen: So this little rotifer
shows us something really amazing.
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It says that you can build a machine
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that is functional, complex, smart,
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but all in a tiny little package,
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one so small that
it's impossible to see it.
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Now, the engineer in me
is just blown away by this thing,
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that anyone could make such a creature.
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But right behind that wonder,
I have to admit, is a bit of envy.
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I mean, nature can do it. Why can't we?
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Why can't we build tiny robots?
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Well, I'm not the only one
to have this idea.
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In fact, in the last, oh, few years,
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researchers around the world
have taken up the task
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of trying to build robots
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that are so small that they can't be seen.
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And what we're going
to tell you about today
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is an effort at Cornell University
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and now at the University of Pennsylvania
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to try to build tiny robots.
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OK, so that's the goal.
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But how do we do it?
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How do we go about building tiny robots?
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Well, Pablo Picasso, of all people,
gives us our first clue.
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Picasso said --
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["Good artists copy,
great artists steal."]
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(Laughter)
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"Good artists copy. Great artists steal."
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(Laughter)
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OK. But steal from what?
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Well, believe it or not,
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most of the technology you need
to build a tiny robot already exists.
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The semiconductor industry
has been getting better and better
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at making tinier and tinier devices,
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so at this point they could put
something like a million transistors
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into the size of a package
that is occupied by, say,
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a single-celled paramecium.
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And it's not just electronics.
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They can also build little sensors,
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LEDs,
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whole communication packages
that are too small to be seen.
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So that's what we're going to do.
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We're going to steal that technology.
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Here's a robot.
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(Laughter)
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Robot's got two parts, as it turns out.
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It's got a head, and it's got legs.
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[Steal these ---> Brains]
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(Laughter)
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We're going to call this a legless robot,
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which may sound exotic,
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but they're pretty cool all by themselves.
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In fact, most of you have
a legless robot with you right now.
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Your smartphone is the world's
most successful legless robot.
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In just 15 years, it has
taken over the entire planet.
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And why not?
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It's such a beautiful little machine.
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It's incredibly intelligent,
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it's got great communication skills,
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and it's all in a package
that you can hold in your hand.
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So we would like to be able
to build something like this,
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only down at the cellular scale,
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the size of a paramecium.
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And here it is.
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This is our cell-sized smartphone.
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It even kind of looks like a smartphone,
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only it's about 10,000 times smaller.
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We call it an OWIC.
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[Optical Wireless Integrated Circuits]
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OK, we're not advertisers, all right?
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(Laughter)
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But it's pretty cool all by itself.
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In fact, this OWIC has a number of parts.
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So up near the top,
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there are these cool little solar cells
that you shine light of the device
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and it wakes up a little circuit
that's there in the middle.
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And that circuit can drive
a little tiny LED
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that can blink at you and allows
the OWIC to communicate with you.
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So unlike your cell phone,
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the OWIC communicates with light,
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sort of like a tiny firefly.
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Now, one thing that's pretty cool
about these OWICs
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is we don't make them one at a time,
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soldering all the pieces together.
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We make them in massive parallel.
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For example, about a million
of these OWICs
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can fit on a single four-inch wafer.
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And just like your phone
has different apps,
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you can have different kinds of OWICs.
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There can be ones that, say,
measure voltage,
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some that measure temperature,
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or just have a little light that can blink
at you to tell you that it's there.
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So that's pretty cool,
these tiny little devices.
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And I'd like to tell you about them
in a little more detail.
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But first, I have to tell you
about something else.
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I'm going to tell you a few things
about pennies that you might not know.
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So this one is a little bit older penny.
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It's got a picture of
the Lincoln Memorial on the back.
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But the first thing you might not know,
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that if you zoom in, you'll find
in the center of this thing
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you can actually see Abraham Lincoln,
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just like in the real Lincoln Memorial
not so far from here.
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What I'm sure you don't know,
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that if you zoom in even further --
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(Laughter)
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you'll see that there's actually
an OWIC on Abe Lincoln's chest.
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(Laughter)
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But the cool thing is,
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you could stare at this all day long
and you would never see it.
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It's invisible to the naked eye.
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These OWICs are so small,
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and we make them in such parallel fashion,
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that each OWIC costs actually
less than a penny.
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In fact, the most expensive thing
in this demo is that little sticker
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that says "OWIC."
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(Laughter)
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That cost about eight cents.
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(Laughter)
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Now, we're very excited about
these things for all sorts of reasons.
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For example, we can use them
as little tiny secure smart tags,
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more identifying than a fingerprint.
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We're actually putting them inside
of other medical instruments
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to give other information,
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and even starting to think about
putting them in the brain
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to listen to neurons one at a time.
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In fact, there's only one thing
wrong with these OWICs:
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it's not a robot.
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It's just a head.
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(Laughter)
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And I think we'll all agree
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that half a robot
really isn't a robot at all.
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Without the legs,
we've got basically nothing.
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MM: OK, so you need the legs, too,
if you want to build a robot.
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Now, here it turns out
you can't just steal
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some preexisting technology.
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If you want legs for your tiny robot,
you need actuators, parts that move.
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They have to satisfy
a lot of different requirements.
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They need to be low voltage.
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They need to be low power, too.
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But most importantly,
they have to be small.
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If you want to build a cell-sized robot,
you need cell-sized legs.
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Now, nobody knows how to build that.
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There was no preexisting technology
that meets all of those demands.
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To make our legs for our tiny robots,
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we had to make something new.
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So here's what we built.
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This is one of our actuators,
and I'm applying a voltage to it.
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When I do, you can see
the actuator respond by curling up.
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Now, this might not look like much,
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but if we were to put a red blood cell
up on the screen, it'd be about that big,
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so these are unbelievably tiny curls.
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They're unbelievably small,
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and yet this device can just bend
and unbend, no problem, nothing breaks.
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So how do we do it?
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Well, the actuator is made
from a layer of platinum
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just a dozen atoms or so thick.
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Now it turns out, if you take
platinum and put it in water
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and apply a voltage to it,
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atoms from the water
will attach or remove themselves
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from the surface of the platinum,
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depending on how much voltage you use.
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This creates a force,
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and you can use that force
for voltage-controlled actuation.
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The key here was to make
everything ultrathin.
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Then your actuator is flexible enough
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to bend to these small
sizes without breaking,
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and it can use the forces that come about
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from just attaching or removing
a single layer of atoms.
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Now, we don't have to build these
one at a time, either.
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In fact, just like the OWICs,
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we can build them massively
in parallel as well.
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So here's a couple thousand
or so actuators,
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and all I'm doing is applying a voltage,
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and they all wave,
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looking like nothing more than the legs
of a future robot army.
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(Laughter)
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So now we've got the brains
and we've got the brawn.
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We've got the smarts and the actuators.
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The OWICs are the brains.
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They give us sensors,
they give us power supplies,
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and they give us a two-way
communication system via light.
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The platinum layers are the muscle.
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They're what's going
to move the robot around.
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Now we can take those two pieces,
put them together
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and start to build our tiny, tiny robots.
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The first thing we wanted to build
was something really simple.
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This robot walks around
under user control.
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In the middle are some solar cells
and some wiring attached to it.
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That's the OWIC.
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They're connected to a set of legs
which have a platinum layer
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and these rigid panels that we put on top
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that tell the legs how to fold up,
which shape they should take.
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The idea is that by shooting a laser
at the different solar cells,
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you can choose which leg you want to move
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and make the robot walk around.
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Now, of course, we don't build those
one at a time, either.
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We build them massively
in parallel as well.
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We can build something like one million
robots on a single four-inch wafer.
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So, for example, this image
on the left, this is a chip,
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and this chip has something like
10,000 robots on it.
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Now, in our world, the macro world,
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this thing looks like it might be
a new microprocessor or something.
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But if you take that chip
and you put it under a microscope,
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what you're going to see are
thousands and thousands of tiny robots.
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Now, these robots are still stuck down.
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They're still attached to the surface
that we built them on.
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In order for them to walk around,
we have to release them.
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We wanted to show you how we do that live,
how we release the robot army,
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but the process involves
highly dangerous chemicals,
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like, really nasty stuff,
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and we're like a mile
from the White House right now?
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Yeah. They wouldn't let us do it.
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So --
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(Laughter)
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so we're going to show you
a movie instead. (Laughs)
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What you're looking at here
are the final stages of robot deployment.
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We're using chemicals
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to etch the substrate
out from underneath the robots.
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When it dissolves, the robots are free
to fold up into their final shapes.
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Now, you can see here,
the yield's about 90 percent,
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so almost every one of those
10,000 robots we build,
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that's a robot that we can
deploy and control later.
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And we can take those robots
and we can put them places as well.
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So if you look at the movie on the left,
that's some robots in water.
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I'm going to come along with a pipette,
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and I can vacuum them all up.
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Now when you inject the robots
back out of that pipette,
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they're just fine.
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In fact, these robots are so small,
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they're small enough to pass through
the thinnest hypodermic needle
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you can buy.
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Yeah, so if you wanted to,
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you could inject yourself full of robots.
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(Laughter)
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I think they're into it.
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(Laughter)
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On the right is a robot
that we put in some pond water.
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I want you to wait for just one second.
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Ooop!
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You see that? That was no shark.
That was a paramecium.
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So that's the world
that these things live in.
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OK, so this is all well and good,
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but you might be wondering at this point,
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"Well, do they walk?"
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Right? That's what they're supposed to do.
They better. So let's find out.
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So here's the robot and here
are its solar cells in the middle.
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Those are those little rectangles.
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I want you to look at the solar cell
closest to the top of the slide.
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See that little white dot?
That's a laser spot.
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Now watch what happens
when we start switching that laser
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between different
solar cells on the robot.
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Off it goes!
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(Applause)
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Yeah!
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(Applause)
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Off goes the robot
marching around the microworld.
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Now, one of the things
that's cool about this movie is:
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I'm actually piloting
the robot in this movie.
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In fact, for six months, my job was
to shoot lasers at tiny cell-sized robots
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to pilot them around the microworld.
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This was actually my job.
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As far as I could tell, that is
the coolest job in the world.
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(Laughter)
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It was just the feeling
of total excitement,
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like you're doing the impossible.
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It's a feeling of wonder like that first
time I looked through a microscope
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as a kid staring at that rotifer.
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Now, I'm a dad, I have a son of my own,
and he's about three years old.
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But one day, he's going to look
through a microscope like that one.
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And I often wonder:
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What is he going to see?
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Instead of just watching the microworld,
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we as humans can now build
technology to shape it,
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to interact with it, to engineer it.
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In 30 years, when my son is my age,
what will we do with that ability?
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Will microrobots live in our bloodstream,
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as common as bacteria?
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Will they live on our crops
and get rid of pests?
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Will they tell us when we have infections,
or will they fight cancer cell by cell?
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PM: And one cool part is,
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you're going to be able to participate
in this revolution.
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Ten years or so from now,
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when you buy your new iPhone 15x Moto
or whatever it's called --
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(Laughter)
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it may come with a little jar
with a few thousand tiny robots in it
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that you can control
by an app on your cell phone.
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So if you want to ride
a paramecium, go for it.
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If you want to -- I don't know --
DJ the world's smallest robot dance party,
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make it happen.
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(Laughter)
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And I, for one, am very excited
about that day coming.
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MM: Thank you.
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(Applause)