Power consumption is a critical issue in the development of mesoscale mobile robots.
This problem arises from the fact that electrochemical battery energy densities are essentially constant, but the total energy stored in the battery scales cubically with the volume. For a geometrically similar system, the amount of available energy therefore scales with the cube of size, while distance scales linearly with size. A geometrically similar and smaller robot therefore has significantly less energy to travel a given distance. The drastic reduction in power availability for small sized robots mandates the development and use of hyper efficient approaches to locomotion. Several crawling prototype designs currently under development address this challenge by means of elastodynamic locomotion.