Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Sungyun Yang is pioneering the frontier of colloidal robotics, focusing on the development of fully autonomous, micrometer-scale machines. Her major contributions lie in integrating critical subsystems—power, memory, and sensing—directly onto these tiny platforms. Yang’s landmark 2023 work, “Colloidal robotics” (39 citations), provides a foundational framework for the field. She has further advanced the domain by designing memristor circuits that grant colloidal robots temporal access to memory, sensing, and actuation (17 citations), and by creating the first picoliter-scale zinc-air microbatteries (14 citations), achieving unprecedented energy density for microscopic systems. Her computational simulations, such as those for microrobots that spontaneously trace chemical contours in their environment, demonstrate a visionary approach to achieving true autonomy without external control. With her work on high-energy-density power sources and integrated circuitry, Yang is directly addressing the core challenges that have kept microrobots tethered to external supervision. Her research is not only redefining the capabilities of smart dust and colloidal state machines but also laying the essential groundwork for a new generation of autonomous microsystems.