Microscopic Robots That Swim Think and Act on Their Own

By University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science January 9, 2026

Collected at: https://scitechdaily.com/microscopic-robots-that-swim-think-and-act-on-their-own/

Scientists have built microscopic, light-powered robots that can think, swim, and operate independently at the scale of living cells.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan have developed the smallest fully programmable autonomous robots ever made. These tiny machines can swim through liquid, sense and respond to their surroundings on their own, operate continuously for months, and cost roughly one penny apiece.

Each robot is nearly invisible without magnification. Measuring about 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers, they are smaller than a grain of salt. Because they function at the same scale as many microorganisms, the robots could eventually support new medical tools for monitoring individual cells and enable new manufacturing techniques for building extremely small devices.

The robots are powered by light and contain microscopic computers. They can be programmed to follow intricate movement patterns, detect temperature changes in their immediate environment, and alter their direction based on those readings.

Details of the work were published in Science Robotics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Unlike earlier small-scale machines, these robots do not rely on wires, magnetic guidance, or external joystick-style control. That independence makes them the first programmable robots at this size that can truly operate on their own.

“We’ve made autonomous robots 10,000 times smaller,” says Marc Miskin, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn Engineering and the papers’ senior author. “That opens up an entirely new scale for programmable robots.”

References:

“Microscopic robots that sense, think, act, and compute” by Maya M. Lassiter, Jungho Lee, Kyle Skelil, Li Xu, Lucas Hanson, William H. Reinhardt, Dennis Sylvester, Mark Yim, David Blaauw and Marc Z. Miskin, 10 December 2025, Science Robotics.
DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adu8009

“Electrokinetic propulsion for electronically integrated microscopic robots” by Lucas C. Hanson, William H. Reinhardt, Scott Shrager, Tarunyaa Sivakumar and Marc Z. Miskin, 15 July 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2500526122