“Low humidity and few bugs.”

Kaushik Jayaram envisions a day when swarms of tiny robots, some weighing no more than a paperclip, will crawl through airplanes or into buildings after an earthquake—searching for survivors or repairing components that no human could ever reach.

“Robots could be really helpful in confined spaces,” said Jayaram, assistant professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder. “If they’re small enough and adaptable enough and agile enough, they can get inside a jet engine, for example, or an underground conduit to inspect electrical pipelines.”

Recently, the roboticist got a big leg up in pursuit of that vision. Jayaram has received a $650,000 grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to design small, shape-shifting robots that can complete a wide range of tasks. The funding is part of the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, its most prestigious award for early-career scientists. In March, Jayaram and Laura Blumenschein at Purdue University also took home a complimentary $1.4 million grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory, the research wing of the U.S. Air Force.

The new projects will build on Jayaram’s previous designs, including mCLARI—a four-legged robot that can fit on top of a quarter and weighs less than half of a penny.

But to be really useful, these kinds of robots will need to be more than just small, Jayaram said. They will also need to be fast and powerful (agile), yet squishy enough to squeeze through cracks and around bends (adaptive). Those traits often bring trade-offs, but Jayaram wants to explore how robots can achieve both at the same time.  

To meet that goal, he draws inspiration from what might seem an unlikely source: insects and other small creatures.

“Animals combine the best of both worlds—they can be really agile, but they’re also adaptable and able to respond to all kinds of new conditions,” he said. “We want to build highly intelligent mechanical systems that are just like those biological systems.”

Using pulses of electricity, the lab’s future robots will be able to not just shapeshift but also walk up walls or even along ceilings. The process relies on static electricity—the same thing that happens when you rub a balloon on your head. The group is also working to design a network of sensors that can extend over the bodies of their robots, allowing these machines to map out the world around them much like the eyes and skin of biological organisms do.