Nano-Robots Have Built the World's Smallest House

French researchers from the Femto-ST Institute have used micro-robots to assemble the world's smallest house, which stands just 0.015 millimetres high.


The tiny house, which has a footprint of 0.02 millimetres by 0.01 millimetres, is around half a million times smaller than a regular two-storey house.

Sitting on the top of an optical fibre the house has a traditional gabled roof, four windows, a door, chimney and walls made of an ultra-thin silica membrane that is just 0.0012 millimetres thick.

While the house would make inadequate shelter for any animal bigger than a micro-organism, its engineers from the Femto-ST Institute, a research organisation in Besançon, France, are celebrating the breakthrough in nano-robotic construction.

"We decided to build the micro-house on the fibre to show that we are able to realise these microsystem assemblies on top of an optical fibre with high accuracy," said engineer Jean-Yves Rauch.

"For the first time we were able to realise patterning and assembly with less than two nanometres [0.002 micrometres] of accuracy, which is a very important result for the robotics and optical community."