A tiny, magnetically actuated gearbox that gives microrobots more power

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, working with a pair of colleagues from the Harbin Institute of Technology, has developed a tiny actuated gearbox that can be used to give very tiny robots more power. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes how their gearbox works and the power improvements observed in several types of tiny robots.