© Georgia Institute of Technology, Allison Carter

The robots are produced in a 3D printer using the TPP process - a technique that polymerizes a monomer resin material. Once the part of the resin block hit by the ultraviolet light is chemically developed, the rest can be flushed away, leaving the desired robot structure. "Currently, the manufacturing process still takes quite a while, so we are looking for ways to scale it up to produce hundreds or thousands of micro-bots at a time," says Ansari.