Allow me to take you on a trip down my memory lane. As a young lad, a film I saw captured my imagination: Fantastic Voyage, a 1966 release about people shrunk to microscopic size and sent into the body of an injured scientist to repair his brain. The idea struck a chord with me. I envisioned one day science would be able to create some sort of miniature machine that performs medical procedures from the inside.
Fast forward several decades into the 21st century, when I started my career as a robotics researcher taking inspiration from neuroscience to implement artificial perception systems. I thought of robots as machines that range from the size of a pet animal to big devices designed to carry out heavy-duty chores. However, I soon started to hear the first hints about research into miniature robots playing exactly the type of role the miniature scientists in Fantastic Voyage acted out. Did this mean that what I imagined as a child was about to come true?
