American engineers have developed a miniature six-legged Picotaur robot weighing 15 milligrams. Each of its six legs is a separate mechanism with two degrees of freedom, driven by two electrostatic actuators. This allows Picotaur to walk in a variety of gaits, reaching a maximum speed of 7.2 body lengths per second, jump, change direction, move small loads and climb stairs. A paper describing the robot's design is published in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems. Miniature robots, comparable in size to insects, can be useful for solving a number of practical tasks in narrow, hard-to-reach places. However, engineers face significant technical hurdles in developing them. In addition to the fact that miniaturization leads to reduced actuator efficiency, producing complex three-dimensional mechanisms on a millimeter scale is a significant challenge in itself, so most of the micro-robots that exist today have simplified designs.