From the folks at MIT and Carnegie Mellon:

It’s only a prototype, but some researchers imagine the water-skimming robot could have many uses. With a chemical sensor, it could monitor water supplies for toxins; with a camera it could be a spy or an explorer; with a net or a boom, it could skim contaminants off the top of water.

Producing it was “the final challenge of microrobotics,” said Sitti, who runs Carnegie Mellon’s NanoRobotics Lab. “It needs to be so light and so compact.”

Sitti’s robot is little more than a half-inch boxy body made from carbon fibers and eight, 2-inch steel-wire legs coated with a water-repelling plastic (technically making it a water spider).

It is clearly evident that the field of robots is advancing at a spectacular rate. With the innovation of smaller and smaller robotic units, is it possible that von Neumann probes will soon be a reality?