“Ants have minuscule brains and they do very simple cognitive tasks, but collectively they can do amazing things. Along with Yang, Thomas Berrueta, a Northwestern University graduate student advised by Professor Todd Murphey, is a lead author of the study.ĭemonstrations of emergent behavior can be seen throughout the natural world, where colonies of insects such as ants and bees accomplish feats that a single member of the group would never be able to achieve. Strano is the senior author of the new paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “We're trying to look for very simple rules or features that you can encode into relatively simple microrobotic machines, to get them to collectively do very sophisticated tasks,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Under the right conditions, these interactions create an oscillator that behaves similar to a ticking clock, beating at intervals of a few seconds. The particles used to create the new oscillator perform a simple chemical reaction that allows the particles to interact with each other through the formation and bursting of tiny gas bubbles. There are a lot of electrical components that require such an oscillatory input,” says Jingfan Yang, a recent MIT PhD recipient and one of the lead authors of the new study. “In addition to being interesting from a physics point of view, this behavior can also be translated into an on-board oscillatory electrical signal, which can be very powerful in microrobotic autonomy. These oscillations can then be harnessed to power tiny robotic devices, the researchers showed. Working together, the microparticles can generate a beating clock that oscillates at a very low frequency. Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food.

Micro center monitor power