Consider what used to be in the northwest corner of Grant Park on land

controlled by the Illinois Central Railroad: an open pit of railroad tracks used
by the Metra and South Shore lines, ugly trusses that held up railroad electric
lines, a dusty surface parking lot and a thin strip of bedraggled parkland.

This is what's there now, the city having sued the Illinois Central and won
control of the land: A handsome 24.5-acre green space that's been outfitted
with Gehry's 11,000-seat outdoor music pavilion and a snaking bridge across
Columbus Drive (the architect's first); an adjoining 1,500-seat indoor theater
by Chicago architect Thomas Beeby; a contemporary outdoor garden by
Seattle's Kathryn Gustafson; the public artworks by Kapoor and Plensa; a
skating rink and two eateries; a slightly downsized re-creation of a 1917
Peristyle at Grant Park's northwest corner, a commuter bike station with
spaces for 300 bikes, and four pavilions, three equipped with elevators that
lead to the park's 2,218-space underground garage (the fourth, to open in
August, will include a park visitor center). There's also a reconstructed Grant
Park North Garage, part of which slides beneath the park (the rest is under
Michigan Avenue).

The chief artistic statements all advance the cutting edge, like Plensa's
fountain at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Drive. Two
50-foot glass block towers project oversize images of 300 (eventually 1,000)
randomly selected Chicagoans. Giant eyes blink. Giant lips purse. Giant teeth
appear and disappear. After appearing on-screen for a few minutes, each face
appears to spit an arc of water into a reflecting pool between the towers, like
a modern version of a medieval gargoyle. The result is at once whimsical and
soulful, though one has to wonder if those spitting faces eventually will
become tiresome one-liners.

In offering this sort of spectacle, Millennium Park is very much a product of

the era in which it was conceived, the roaring 1990s, before the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, deepened the economy's tailspin and put a damper
on the very sort of cultural tourism that city officials are depending on to
make the park an economic success.

In the '90s, architecture became a series of can-you-top-this virtuoso

performances by the likes of Gehry and the Spanish architect and engineer
Santiago Calatrava. With cities and patrons flush with cash, it was a golden
age for knock-your-eyes-out architecture and, yet, it put too much emphasis
on destination buildings rather than making the public spaces between them
inviting.
In-between spaces

So it is at Millennium Park, where donors splurged on splashy objects, but

city officials, who were surprised by the ever-escalating cost of the park's
structural undergirding, were forced to shortchange the spaces in between.

Even some of the privately funded spaces, like the barren Bank One
Promenade, a three-block-long stretch of concrete in the middle of the park
that resembles nothing so much as a giant drag strip, are disappointingly
subpar.

And while 55 comfortable and clean-lined contemporary benches have been

installed in the park -- certainly a good start -- more than double that
number are needed if Millennium Park is to approach the civility of New
York City's Central Park, where an abundance of benches encourage visitors
to plop down, read a newspaper, nuzzle, ogle and do other things that people
in parks do. At Millennium, far too many parkgoers are being forced to camp
out on the grass.

The park has other faults, from the confusing layout of its underground
parking garage to the crudely designed railings that furnish the highly visible
emergency exit stairs from the garage and blight the park's elegantly
reconstructed beaux-arts landscape.

These flaws might have been avoided had the park been carefully thought out
rather than rushed into construction to meet Daley's wildly unrealistic year
2000 deadline.

While it's too late to correct them, there is still time to deal with the fact that
Gehry's pavilion will not have enough seating capacity to host musical events
at Taste of Chicago and other major summer festivals (it will instead be home
to the Grant Park Orchestra).

The solution? City officials need to get going on their plan to relocate the big
music events from the mudflats of Butler Field (home of Petrillo Music Shell)
to Hutchinson Field, the elegantly sunken space at Grant Park's south end
that's already hosted concerts by the likes of country star Shania Twain and
the British rockers Radiohead.

If that shift happens, Grant Park will have two prime musical venues and the
public perception of Millennium Park will not be that it's "of, by and for the
rich," but rather that it started a rising tide that lifted all boats.
Given that the park was made up as it went along, with the contemporary
elements essentially plugged into the original beaux-art framework, it is
astonishing that things turned out as well as they did. Much of the credit for
that goes to the park's director of design Ed Uhlir, a former Chicago Park
District planner who knows the lakefront as well as anybody.

Millennium Park forms a remarkably sensitive transition between Grant

Park's historic, beaux-art landscape along Michigan Avenue and its bigger,
modern spaces, such as Butler Field, that sit farther east along the lake. The
new park, in other words, is not an isolated quadrant, a flashy newcomer that
looks down its nose at the dowager park around it.

With Gehry's BP Bridge, it joins up with Daley Bicentennial Plaza to its east,
allowing pedestrians to cross over brutal, intimidating Columbus Drive. And
Gehry makes that link with wonderful playfulness. His snaking, sculptural
span surely will become a destination in its own right.

Of course, a park ought to succeed at a micro-level as well as macro-level; it

should be a big community that consists of lots of smaller communities.

Good beginning

Here again, Millennium Park is off to a fine start, as you learn by taking a
close look at the area in the northwest corner of the park called Wrigley
Square. This area, originally part of the thin strip of land in this section of
Grant Park, reopened two years ago after the Grant Park North Garage was
rebuilt.

Before, it was a mess -- a blotchy patch of grass with boxy metal air vents for
the garage sitting right alongside Michigan Avenue. Trees were scattered
everywhere. With no place to sit but the ground, people ate their lunches and
even sunbathed on the air vents. Drug dealers would stash their drugs in the
air vents.

Today, order has replaced visual chaos. The air vents are gone, there are
ledges on which to sit, and benches will be installed once an exhibition that
pictures families from around the world closes in September. A double-row
of elm trees along Michigan frames a roomlike outdoor space. Slip through a
break in the trees and you're inside the room, treated -- surprise -- to a view
of the re-created Peristyle, with its double rows of Doric columns curving
above a base that eventually will be inscribed with the donors' names. The
Peristyle, also known as the Millennium Monument, is what architects call a
folly, an expensive, but essentially useless, building that adorns the natural
landscape.

Forget the idea of calling Millennium Park Daley's Folly. Wealthy English,
French and Italian landowners once built follies in the gardens on their
estates. Now, in an exquisitely democratic twist, there are follies in the
people's park.

Today, because its landscape isn't fully matured, these follies suffer from the
stand-alone syndrome, coming awfully close to the theme park model of
isolated objects, or pavilions, that hit you over the head with all the subtlety
of a frying pan.

But once the landscape matures, as it has done in Wrigley Square, it should
provide the subtle progression of vistas, pathways and discovery that
distinguishes an artful park from an artless theme park. That is the
reasonable prediction of Chicago's Terry Guen, who worked with Carol
Yetkin, also of Chicago, to prepare the overall landscape plan. And the
growth of the landscape to date backs her up.

Millennium Park also has cured another ill of old Grant Park -- it was
thronged with people during the popular summer festivals, but was
practically empty otherwise.

Now, as anyone who has been to the McCormick Tribune Plaza and Ice Rink
just south of Wrigley Square knows, the park buzzes with activity, even in
January, with the rink treating skaters to a drop-dead view of the Michigan
Avenue skyline.

The Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance furthers the
year-round cause, drawing patrons in the fall, winter and spring months to
an intimate underground theater, though it's a journey some have not so
happily likened to a trip to Middle-earth.

High expectations

Rightly or wrongly, people come to parks today expecting a tour de force, a

"wow" experience. And that is what Millennium Park gives them from the
get-go, beginning with Kapoor's sculpture, his first public work in the United
States, which he has titled "Cloud Gate" but already is popularly known as
the "Bean."
Placed on a raised plaza above the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink, "Cloud
Gate" is perfectly sited to capture the warped reflection of the downtown
skyline on its elliptical, polished-mirror surface.

The piece combines the populism of a fun-house mirror with the superb
artistry that makes what is heavy seem feather-light and what is monumental
seem as if it might disappear. The only trouble is that the setting, a bare
concrete plaza, does not befit the jewel.

Like the Crown Fountain, where you can walk into the shallow reflecting pool
and touch the water cascading down from the glass-block towers, Kapoor's
sculpture is a participatory piece of public art -- a welcome shift from
Buckingham Fountain, which parkgoers must view from behind a fence.

It also merges sculpture with architecture, as indicated by the "Gate" in its

title, though Kapoor admits that its arching underside isn't really a gateway
to anything; he just wants people to enjoy the spatial experience of passing
underneath its arch.

The sculpture-architecture combination is felicitous because Gehry is often

called a sculptor whose medium is architecture. He has sculpted again to
great effect in the Pritzker Pavilion, whose exuberant metal curves make just
the right festive statement for the park.

There's a wonderful interplay between the pavilion's sculptural "headdress"

and its skeletal, 600-foot-long trellis, which covers a seating area for 4,000
fixed seats and an oval lawn that will accommodate 7,000 people. The trellis,
which has suspended speakers and is expected to offer sound comparable to
the inside of a concert hall, creates a stunning spatial and structural
experience -- its oval room playing off Grant Park's rectangular rooms, its
framework of curving steel pipes tweaking Chicago's right-angled cages of
steel.

Skyline view

Here, with the dome-like trellis providing a knockout view of the downtown
skyline, Gehry shows that he is a shaper of great spaces as well as great
objects. And this space is deeply democratic, uniting those in the fixed seats
with those on the lawn in a way that wisely departs from the conventional
pavilion/lawn split at Ravinia and other outdoor concert venues.
This is architecture with a capital "A," and even if the music pavilion has
faults -- its curving steel pipes look a bit too thick, for example-- they can be
forgiven because Gehry has so superbly met the twin challenges of living up
to Chicago's vaunted architectural tradition and respecting the old beaux-arts
park and giving it new zing.

There's so much more to Millennium Park, including the Lurie Garden,

which relates superbly to Gehry's bandshell and is a bracing exploration of
contemporary landscape design, but I have to stop writing lest anyone in the
Tribune's accounting department accuse me of getting paid by the word. The
other features in the park, including the garden, are covered in
accompanying capsule reviews.

Even though Millennium Park is a throwback to the roaring '90s, even if the
pendulum in architecture is now swinging from playful formal experiments
to more sober, energy-saving designs, the park is nonetheless relevant in an
unexpected way: Our quest for joy, for delight and surprise, for
entertainment and enlightenment, for gathering and partaking of each other,
did not vanish with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. If anything, we need those
things even more. And the park delivers them with the kind of superb style
that simultaneously makes us smile and makes us think.

As Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" so magically shows, a park provides a respite from

the city, yet it also reflects the city. In that sense, all of Millennium Park
mirrors the rebirth of Chicago, not just the robustness of the real estate
market, but the ambition of its patrons, the creativity of its artists and
architects, and the ongoing miracle of its ability to transform a no place into
a someplace that's extraordinary.

Consider what used to be in the northwest corner of Grant Park on land

controlled by the Illinois Central Railroad: an open pit of railroad tracks used
by the Metra and South Shore lines, ugly trusses that held up railroad electric
lines, a dusty surface parking lot and a thin strip of bedraggled parkland.

This is what's there now, the city having sued the Illinois Central and won
control of the land: A handsome 24.5-acre green space that's been outfitted
with Gehry's 11,000-seat outdoor music pavilion and a snaking bridge across
Columbus Drive (the architect's first); an adjoining 1,500-seat indoor theater
by Chicago architect Thomas Beeby; a contemporary outdoor garden by
Seattle's Kathryn Gustafson; the public artworks by Kapoor and Plensa; a
skating rink and two eateries; a slightly downsized re-creation of a 1917
Peristyle at Grant Park's northwest corner, a commuter bike station with
spaces for 300 bikes, and four pavilions, three equipped with elevators that
lead to the park's 2,218-space underground garage (the fourth, to open in
August, will include a park visitor center). There's also a reconstructed Grant
Park North Garage, part of which slides beneath the park (the rest is under
Michigan Avenue).

The chief artistic statements all advance the cutting edge, like Plensa's
fountain at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Drive. Two
50-foot glass block towers project oversize images of 300 (eventually 1,000)
randomly selected Chicagoans. Giant eyes blink. Giant lips purse. Giant teeth
appear and disappear. After appearing on-screen for a few minutes, each face
appears to spit an arc of water into a reflecting pool between the towers, like
a modern version of a medieval gargoyle. The result is at once whimsical and
soulful, though one has to wonder if those spitting faces eventually will
become tiresome one-liners.

In offering this sort of spectacle, Millennium Park is very much a product of

the era in which it was conceived, the roaring 1990s, before the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, deepened the economy's tailspin and put a damper
on the very sort of cultural tourism that city officials are depending on to
make the park an economic success.

In the '90s, architecture became a series of can-you-top-this virtuoso

performances by the likes of Gehry and the Spanish architect and engineer
Santiago Calatrava. With cities and patrons flush with cash, it was a golden
age for knock-your-eyes-out architecture and, yet, it put too much emphasis
on destination buildings rather than making the public spaces between them
inviting.

In-between spaces

So it is at Millennium Park, where donors splurged on splashy objects, but

city officials, who were surprised by the ever-escalating cost of the park's
structural undergirding, were forced to shortchange the spaces in between.

Even some of the privately funded spaces, like the barren Bank One
Promenade, a three-block-long stretch of concrete in the middle of the park
that resembles nothing so much as a giant drag strip, are disappointingly
subpar.
And while 55 comfortable and clean-lined contemporary benches have been
installed in the park -- certainly a good start -- more than double that
number are needed if Millennium Park is to approach the civility of New
York City's Central Park, where an abundance of benches encourage visitors
to plop down, read a newspaper, nuzzle, ogle and do other things that people
in parks do. At Millennium, far too many parkgoers are being forced to camp
out on the grass.

The park has other faults, from the confusing layout of its underground
parking garage to the crudely designed railings that furnish the highly visible
emergency exit stairs from the garage and blight the park's elegantly
reconstructed beaux-arts landscape.

These flaws might have been avoided had the park been carefully thought out
rather than rushed into construction to meet Daley's wildly unrealistic year
2000 deadline.

While it's too late to correct them, there is still time to deal with the fact that
Gehry's pavilion will not have enough seating capacity to host musical events
at Taste of Chicago and other major summer festivals (it will instead be home
to the Grant Park Orchestra).

The solution? City officials need to get going on their plan to relocate the big
music events from the mudflats of Butler Field (home of Petrillo Music Shell)
to Hutchinson Field, the elegantly sunken space at Grant Park's south end
that's already hosted concerts by the likes of country star Shania Twain and
the British rockers Radiohead.

If that shift happens, Grant Park will have two prime musical venues and the
public perception of Millennium Park will not be that it's "of, by and for the
rich," but rather that it started a rising tide that lifted all boats.

Given that the park was made up as it went along, with the contemporary
elements essentially plugged into the original beaux-art framework, it is
astonishing that things turned out as well as they did. Much of the credit for
that goes to the park's director of design Ed Uhlir, a former Chicago Park
District planner who knows the lakefront as well as anybody.

Millennium Park forms a remarkably sensitive transition between Grant

Park's historic, beaux-art landscape along Michigan Avenue and its bigger,
modern spaces, such as Butler Field, that sit farther east along the lake. The
new park, in other words, is not an isolated quadrant, a flashy newcomer that
looks down its nose at the dowager park around it.

With Gehry's BP Bridge, it joins up with Daley Bicentennial Plaza to its east,
allowing pedestrians to cross over brutal, intimidating Columbus Drive. And
Gehry makes that link with wonderful playfulness. His snaking, sculptural
span surely will become a destination in its own right.

Of course, a park ought to succeed at a micro-level as well as macro-level; it

should be a big community that consists of lots of smaller communities.

Good beginning

Here again, Millennium Park is off to a fine start, as you learn by taking a
close look at the area in the northwest corner of the park called Wrigley
Square. This area, originally part of the thin strip of land in this section of
Grant Park, reopened two years ago after the Grant Park North Garage was
rebuilt.

Before, it was a mess -- a blotchy patch of grass with boxy metal air vents for
the garage sitting right alongside Michigan Avenue. Trees were scattered
everywhere. With no place to sit but the ground, people ate their lunches and
even sunbathed on the air vents. Drug dealers would stash their drugs in the
air vents.

Today, order has replaced visual chaos. The air vents are gone, there are
ledges on which to sit, and benches will be installed once an exhibition that
pictures families from around the world closes in September. A double-row
of elm trees along Michigan frames a roomlike outdoor space. Slip through a
break in the trees and you're inside the room, treated -- surprise -- to a view
of the re-created Peristyle, with its double rows of Doric columns curving
above a base that eventually will be inscribed with the donors' names. The
Peristyle, also known as the Millennium Monument, is what architects call a
folly, an expensive, but essentially useless, building that adorns the natural
landscape.

Forget the idea of calling Millennium Park Daley's Folly. Wealthy English,
French and Italian landowners once built follies in the gardens on their
estates. Now, in an exquisitely democratic twist, there are follies in the
people's park.
Today, because its landscape isn't fully matured, these follies suffer from the
stand-alone syndrome, coming awfully close to the theme park model of
isolated objects, or pavilions, that hit you over the head with all the subtlety
of a frying pan.

But once the landscape matures, as it has done in Wrigley Square, it should
provide the subtle progression of vistas, pathways and discovery that
distinguishes an artful park from an artless theme park. That is the
reasonable prediction of Chicago's Terry Guen, who worked with Carol
Yetkin, also of Chicago, to prepare the overall landscape plan. And the
growth of the landscape to date backs her up.

Millennium Park also has cured another ill of old Grant Park -- it was
thronged with people during the popular summer festivals, but was
practically empty otherwise.

Now, as anyone who has been to the McCormick Tribune Plaza and Ice Rink
just south of Wrigley Square knows, the park buzzes with activity, even in
January, with the rink treating skaters to a drop-dead view of the Michigan
Avenue skyline.

The Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance furthers the
year-round cause, drawing patrons in the fall, winter and spring months to
an intimate underground theater, though it's a journey some have not so
happily likened to a trip to Middle-earth.

High expectations

Rightly or wrongly, people come to parks today expecting a tour de force, a

"wow" experience. And that is what Millennium Park gives them from the
get-go, beginning with Kapoor's sculpture, his first public work in the United
States, which he has titled "Cloud Gate" but already is popularly known as
the "Bean."

Placed on a raised plaza above the McCormick Tribune Ice Rink, "Cloud
Gate" is perfectly sited to capture the warped reflection of the downtown
skyline on its elliptical, polished-mirror surface.

The piece combines the populism of a fun-house mirror with the superb
artistry that makes what is heavy seem feather-light and what is monumental
seem as if it might disappear. The only trouble is that the setting, a bare
concrete plaza, does not befit the jewel.
Like the Crown Fountain, where you can walk into the shallow reflecting pool
and touch the water cascading down from the glass-block towers, Kapoor's
sculpture is a participatory piece of public art -- a welcome shift from
Buckingham Fountain, which parkgoers must view from behind a fence.

It also merges sculpture with architecture, as indicated by the "Gate" in its

title, though Kapoor admits that its arching underside isn't really a gateway
to anything; he just wants people to enjoy the spatial experience of passing
underneath its arch.

The sculpture-architecture combination is felicitous because Gehry is often

called a sculptor whose medium is architecture. He has sculpted again to
great effect in the Pritzker Pavilion, whose exuberant metal curves make just
the right festive statement for the park.

There's a wonderful interplay between the pavilion's sculptural "headdress"

and its skeletal, 600-foot-long trellis, which covers a seating area for 4,000
fixed seats and an oval lawn that will accommodate 7,000 people. The trellis,
which has suspended speakers and is expected to offer sound comparable to
the inside of a concert hall, creates a stunning spatial and structural
experience -- its oval room playing off Grant Park's rectangular rooms, its
framework of curving steel pipes tweaking Chicago's right-angled cages of
steel.

Skyline view

Here, with the dome-like trellis providing a knockout view of the downtown
skyline, Gehry shows that he is a shaper of great spaces as well as great
objects. And this space is deeply democratic, uniting those in the fixed seats
with those on the lawn in a way that wisely departs from the conventional
pavilion/lawn split at Ravinia and other outdoor concert venues.

This is architecture with a capital "A," and even if the music pavilion has
faults -- its curving steel pipes look a bit too thick, for example-- they can be
forgiven because Gehry has so superbly met the twin challenges of living up
to Chicago's vaunted architectural tradition and respecting the old beaux-arts
park and giving it new zing.

There's so much more to Millennium Park, including the Lurie Garden,

which relates superbly to Gehry's bandshell and is a bracing exploration of
contemporary landscape design, but I have to stop writing lest anyone in the
Tribune's accounting department accuse me of getting paid by the word. The
other features in the park, including the garden, are covered in
accompanying capsule reviews.

Even though Millennium Park is a throwback to the roaring '90s, even if the
pendulum in architecture is now swinging from playful formal experiments
to more sober, energy-saving designs, the park is nonetheless relevant in an
unexpected way: Our quest for joy, for delight and surprise, for
entertainment and enlightenment, for gathering and partaking of each other,
did not vanish with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. If anything, we need those
things even more. And the park delivers them with the kind of superb style
that simultaneously makes us smile and makes us think.

As Kapoor's "Cloud Gate" so magically shows, a park provides a respite from

the city, yet it also reflects the city. In that sense, all of Millennium Park
mirrors the rebirth of Chicago, not just the robustness of the real estate
market, but the ambition of its patrons, the creativity of its artists and
architects, and the ongoing miracle of its ability to transform a no place into
a someplace that's extraordinary.

land: A handsome 24.5-acre green space that's been outfitted with Gehry's
11,000-seat outdoor music pavilion and a snaking bridge across Columbus
Drive (the architect's first); an adjoining 1,500-seat indoor theater by
Chicago architect Thomas Beeby; a contemporary outdoor garden by
Seattle's Kathryn Gustafson; the public artworks by Kapoor and Plensa; a
skating rink and two eateries; a slightly downsized re-creation of a 1917
Peristyle at Grant Park's northwest corner, a commuter bike station with
spaces for 300 bikes, and four pavilions, three equipped with elevators that
lead to the park's 2,218-space underground garage (the fourth, to open in
August, will include a park visitor center). There's also a reconstructed Grant
Park North Garage, part of which slides beneath the park (the rest is under
Michigan Avenue).

The chief artistic statements all advance the cutting edge, like Plensa's
fountain at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Drive. Two
50-foot glass block towers project oversize images of 300 (eventually 1,000)
randomly selected Chicagoans. Giant eyes blink. Giant lips purse. Giant teeth
appear and disappear. After appearing on-screen for a few minutes, each face
appears to spit an arc of water into a reflecting pool between land: A
handsome 24.5-acre green space that's been outfitted with Gehry's 11,000-
seat outdoor music pavilion and a snaking bridge across Columbus Drive (the
architect's first); an adjoining 1,500-seat indoor theater by Chicago architect
Thomas Beeby; a contemporary outdoor garden by Seattle's Kathryn
Gustafson; the public artworks by Kapoor and Plensa; a skating rink and two
eateries; a slightly downsized re-creation of a 1917 Peristyle at Grant Park's
northwest corner, a commuter bike station with spaces for 300 bikes, and
four pavilions, three equipped with elevators that lead to the park's 2,218-
space underground garage (the fourth, to open in August, will include a park
visitor center). There's also a reconstructed Grant Park North Garage, part of
which slides beneath the park (the rest is under Michigan Avenue).

The chief artistic statements all advance the cutting edge, like Plensa's
fountain at the northeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Drive. Two
50-foot glass block towers project oversize images of 300 (eventually 1,000)
randomly selected Chicagoans. Giant eyes blink. Giant lips purse. Giant teeth
appear and disappear. After appearing on-screen for a few minutes, each face
appears to spit an arc of water into a reflecting pool between
While Cornell researchers and others have previously developed microscopic machines that can
crawl, swim, walk and fold themselves up, there were always "strings" attached; to generate motion,
wires were used to provide electrical current or laser beams had to be focused directly onto specific
locations on the robots.
"Before, we literally had to manipulate these 'strings' in order to get any kind of response from the
robot," said Itai Cohen, professor of physics. "But now that we have these brains on board, it's like
taking the strings off the marionette. It's like when Pinocchio gains consciousness."
The innovation sets the stage for a new generation of microscopic devices that can track bacteria,
sniff out chemicals, destroy pollutants, conduct microsurgery and scrub the plaque out of arteries.
The project brought together researchers from the labs of Cohen, Alyosha Molnar, associate
professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Paul McEuen, professor of physical science,
all co-senior authors on the paper. The lead author is postdoctoral researcher Michael Reynolds.
The team's paper, "Microscopic Robots with Onboard Digital Control," published Sept. 21 in Science
Robotics.
The "brain" in the new robots is a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) clock circuit
that contains a thousand transistors, plus an array of diodes, resistors and capacitors. The
integrated CMOS circuit generates a signal that produces a series of phase-shifted square wave
frequencies that in turn set the gait of the robot. The robot legs are platinum-based actuators. Both
the circuit and the legs are powered by photovoltaics.
"Eventually, the ability to communicate a command will allow us to give the robot instructions, and
the internal brain will figure out how to carry them out," Cohen said. "Then we're having a
conversation with the robot. The robot might tell us something about its environment, and then we
might react by telling it, 'OK, go over there and try to suss out what's happening.'"
While Cornell researchers and others have previously developed microscopic machines that can
crawl, swim, walk and fold themselves up, there were always "strings" attached; to generate motion,
wires were used to provide electrical current or laser beams had to be focused directly onto specific
locations on the robots.
"Before, we literally had to manipulate these 'strings' in order to get any kind of response from the
robot," said Itai Cohen, professor of physics. "But now that we have these brains on board, it's like
taking the strings off the marionette. It's like when Pinocchio gains consciousness."
The innovation sets the stage for a new generation of microscopic devices that can track bacteria,
sniff out chemicals, destroy pollutants, conduct microsurgery and scrub the plaque out of arteries.
The project brought together researchers from the labs of Cohen, Alyosha Molnar, associate
professor of electrical and computer engineering; and Paul McEuen, professor of physical science,
all co-senior authors on the paper. The lead author is postdoctoral researcher Michael Reynolds.
The team's paper, "Microscopic Robots with Onboard Digital Control," published Sept. 21 in Science
Robotics.
The "brain" in the new robots is a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) clock circuit
that contains a thousand transistors, plus an array of diodes, resistors and capacitors. The
integrated CMOS circuit generates a signal that produces a series of phase-shifted square wave
frequencies that in turn set the gait of the robot. The robot legs are platinum-based actuators. Both
the circuit and the legs are powered by photovoltaics.
"Eventually, the ability to communicate a command will allow us to give the robot instructions, and
the internal brain will figure out how to carry them out," Cohen said. "Then we're having a
conversation with the robot. The robot might tell us something about its environment, and then we
might react by telling it, 'OK, go over there and try to suss out what's happening.'"