Video: Watch six robot ants pull a car

Six super strong MicroTug robots manage to pull a 1800kg car

Mechanical engineers have developed a team of six tiny 17g robotic ants capable of working together to pull a 1,800kg car.

The MicroTug robots, developed by researchers at Stanford University, inspired by the anatomical design of ants, which are able to carry large amounts of weight – ants can lift up to 100 times their own body mass – and move in small chain-like formations to move huge objects as a team.

The robots first featured in a paper co-authored by PhD student David L. Christensen and Elliot W. Hawkes from Stanford in 2015 called µTugs: Enabling Microrobots to Deliver Macro Forces with Controllable Adhesives. The microrobots the engineers developed use a special adhesive inspired by gecko toes to move items more than 2,000 times their own weight. The initial research showed that these miniature, lightweight robots are able to apply enough force to “substantially interact with the human world, while still being surprisingly efficient and fast”.

This next step was to discover whether the microbots could work together, like ants, to move heavy objects together. After testing various moving and walking robots, the team found that the best option was to use a “very long, very slow, but very steady winching gait”. The result, the video said, is “near perfect team work”, with the robots able to move the 1800kg car and driver. 

The research paper Let’s All Pull Together: Principles for Sharing Large Loads in Microrobot Teams was written by Christensen, graduate student Srinivasan Suresh, researcher Katie Hahm and mechanical engineering professor Mark Cutkosky.