According to experts, the future of intelligent robots will be tiny.

These small and seemingly simple and vulnerable creatures are actually the most intelligent. They have evolved to live in all kinds of environments and exhibit different behaviors in order to survive, and today there are already flying, crawling and swimming insects.

Considering its size, they are extremely smart and energy efficient and this is taken into account by specialists in robotics.

All of these traits must be present in small, simple robots if they are to be useful in the real world, the researchers said in a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

“If we get take advantage of AI Inspired by insects, small robots will be able to solve complex problems within their limited memory and computing budget.” they write.

With all this, logically, they got to work and are already building robots that look like insects. A striking example is the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the Delft University of Technology (Netherlands), where tiny drones designed to detect gas leaks in buildings. Small, cheap and very efficient.

Another case is a wireless flying robot with a pair of wings that weighs only a few grams but is capable of taking off and landing.

Despite this, it is also a reality that the problems are more serious. “Many deep neural networks developed in AI are interesting in principle, but they will not be able to work in small robots yet”They comment on the report.

And that’s what many embedded computers are made to run neural networks. on the one hand they are too heavy, and on the other they consume a lot of energy for their tiny size. A very popular embedded processor for deep networks, the Nvidia TX 2 weighs 85 grams and consumes 7.5 watts, making it unsuitable for these cases.

However, researchers are slowly taking small steps and are already developing microcontrollers and other chips for tiny embedded systems that are powerful enough to bring their designs to life.