Engineers from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois have developed the smallest walking robot ever, and it’s a crab. The half-millimeter robot is modeled after a peekytoe crab and is just the latest iteration in a long line of small robots created by the researchers. The goal for creating a bot so small is to move towards more practical uses of the technology and gaining entry to more hard to reach, tightly confined spaces. | Mashable

This remote-controlled walking robot is the smallest ever created, and it could one day be scuttling around inside you. Say hello to the peekytoe crab robot which is able to move without complex hardware, hydraulics, or electricity. Instead, the locomotion is created by the robot’s shape-memory alloy, which deforms into its remembered shape when heated. A laser is used to rapidly heat the robot at different targeted locations, and a thin coating of glass elastically returns that part of the robo