CU researcher receives $1.4m grant to create insect-sized robots

DENVER (KDVR) — A University of Colorado Boulder researcher received a grant to build something straight out of a spy movie.

The United States Air Force Research Laboratory awarded CU assistant professor Kaushik Jayaram and collaborator, Laura Blumenschein from Purdue University, a $1.4 million grant to design insect-sized robots.

While they may be small in size, the robots would be assigned a massive task: inspecting areas in tight spaces, such as a jet engine, for anything that needs to be repaired, without the need for disassembly or destruction to view the interior components, and at a fraction of the time and cost.

“If you look at the infrastructure around us, there are a lot of buildings, bridges, dams and machines that have all of these little nooks and crannies,” said Jayaram who is also affiliated with the BioFrontiers Institute, the Biomedical Engineering Program, the Robotics Program and the Materials Science and Engineering Program on the school's website. “They need very careful, regular inspection and maintenance, but there’s just no easy, cost-effective way to get in.”

Jayaram said the project was created in response to the 15% of aviation accidents that are caused by mechanical malfunction. In 2025, there have been 94 aviation accidents so far, with 13 of them being deadly, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

“When it comes to tasks such as flying, where human safety is paramount, we need aircraft technology and machinery to work 100% of the time,” Jayaram said. “Our research is one of the efforts to address these concerns using the advantages of robotics.”

The insect-sized robots pair with "inflatable vine-like robots that grow like plants and curl like snakes." The vines will scatter throughout the tight spaces, which almost look like a maze and perform an evaluation.

Jayaram has created the mCLARI microrobot, which looks almost like a beetle combined with a space pod, weighs less than a gram, and can climb and squeeze through cracks the size of a penny, with its millimeter-precise, accurate mobility. It also uses cameras and miniature evaluation sensors to transmit real-time data.

One area the mCLARI struggles in is its ability to hold weight. Large sources of power, like a battery, are too heavy and don't allow the robot to travel far, but that's where the vine idea comes into play.

The mCLARI will use the expanding, inflatable vines as a chauffeur to the trouble area, which allows the tiny robot to reserve its power for brief explorations before hopping back into the vine and being pulled from the area.

While the initial function of the robot will be for aviation, Jayaram has visions that the technology can be applied in many other fields, like wildfire mitigation and response, or even in emergency situations where the robot could travel into a collapsed building to search for people in the rubble.

“These small, confined crevices and spaces are actually way more ubiquitous than we originally thought. Even in the medical arena—if we shrink these robots even further, make them shapeshift, and use biocompatible materials, maybe our technology can one day be crawling inside our bodies, detecting and releasing blood clots or taking measurements just like a pill,” Jayaram said. “We get very excited when we think about the future. If we can build systems that can effectively navigate the world and combine them with sensors, we can do a lot.”