“It’s the first tiny robot to be able to sense, think and act,” coauthor Marc Miskin, assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering at UPenn, told WaPo. Building a microscopic robot that can move, sense its surroundings, and make decisions on its own has evaded scientists for decades. Having a robot on the scale of microns, or one millionth of a meter, would give us access to what corresponds to the smallest units of our biology, Miskin told WaPo. “At this scale, the robot’s size and power budget are comparable to many unicellular microorganisms,” the team wrote in the study. “So the next holy grail really is for them to communicate with each other,” Blaauw told WaPo.