| Robugs: Smart Dust Has Legs by David Pescovitz years, I've had
this dream of making silicon walk," says UC Berkeley professor
Kristofer Pister of the Department of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Sciences. Professor Kris Pister is currently on
industrial leave from the University, working at his start-up
company Dust Inc. Peg Skorpinski photo It's a startling idea:
Swarms of ant-size robots burrowing through the rubble of a
building after an earthquake searching for survivors or crawling
onto the hull of a spacecraft to repair damage in-flight. But
perhaps the most amazing thing about Pister's dream is that it's
not as far off as one might think. Already Pister and his
graduate students have built simple solar-powered microrobots
just 8.5 millimeters long and less than 4 millimeters wide. "It
only has two legs and its tail is too heavy, so it can't quite
walk," Pister says. "But it does push-ups." Still, the solar-
powered bug demonstrates that tiny autonomous robots can be
fabricated using the same tech