Miniaturization of a Piezo-Actuation System Embedded in an Instrumented Autonomous Robot

The paper introduces a miniaturization approach for the piezo-actuation and related systems embedded in a new version of a miniature autonomous robot named NanoWalker for operations at the molecular scale. Since the throughput of such platform is determined in great part not only by the number of robots operating simultaneously but also by the density of robots, a higher level of miniaturization would typically translate into a higher number of operations performed per second. First estimations suggest that the initial overall dimensions of 30 mm³ 3 of the preceding version of the NanoWalker can be reduced to less than 10 mm³ for the future prototype of the robot