Category: Robotics

A short article on the Small Times website ("Scientists want to send nanobots to search and destroy brown tide", by Richard Acello, 22 January 2002) provides a few additional details on the project announced on 10 January 2002 by the Laboratory for Molecular Robotics (LMR) at the University of Southern California School of Engineering to use a $1.5 million research grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to create swarms of microscopic robots. The application envisioned for such a system is to monitor potentially dangerous microorganisms in the ocean.

The project calls for initial designs to be tested in laboratory tanks, but, as the Small Times article notes, eventually the USC team wants to create robots that are as small as the microorganisms that they seek to monitor. Ari Requicha, a USC professor of computer science and the project's principal investigator, said heíll be ready to move his early stage robots into the ocean ìin a couple of years or so.î The article also notes that the long-term goal of the technology, said Requicha, is its use in the human body. ìIf you can make a system that can detect microorganisms in a marine environment, it could be deployed in blood. If you were successful, you could have artificial cells, you could program an artificial immune system for those with impaired immune systems. The possibilities are amazing.î

Some recent work with macroscopic robots is aimed at developing the sorts of capabilities that are often envisioned for future nanorobotic systems:

• A press release from 14 December 2001 tells of a research team at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is conducting work with small networks of distributed sensors to provide pervasive monitoring of terrain for military applications. The network is made up of hundreds of sensors that send information to collecting nodes. The aim is to develop in smart, low-cost integrated devices containing many different types of sensors, wireless transceivers and processors with significant computing capabilities collects data from hundreds of similarly disguised wireless microelectromechanical (MEMS) sensors and relays it to an unmanned aircraft that pieces together the information to identify vehicles (such as a tank) or other objects moving across the landscape.
• A lengthy article on the Small Times website ("Nanoresearchersí little helpers come equipped with tiny tool belt", by M. Downs, 19 December 2001) describes work by robotics researcher Sylvain Martel at the Nano-Robotics Research Group within the MIT BioInstrumentation Laboratory, who has created small mobile robots, which he calls NanoWalkers, that he intends to equip with "scanning-tunneling microscope (STM) tips for imaging and nudging atoms, some with atomic force tips for working on nonconductive materials, others with micromanipulators for moving and assembling micron-size parts, and eventually even atoms. They'll also have an array of other tools for nanoscale deposition, etching, machining and imaging." The article says Martel started with an STM tip because it is a critical tool for atomic-scale imaging, but also because he had some experience with traditional STMís. The group hopes to go on and add a variety of tools to the basic platform, including Confocal laser microscopy, raman microscopy, mechanical and electrical impedance imaging, thermo-imaging, microinjection and micromachining. Whether these robotic systems can be scaled down to perform useful work at the nanoscale is uncertain.

from the mind-children dept.
A cover story in a recent issue of U.S. News and World Report ("The Age of Robots", by Thomas Hayden, 23 April 2001) takes a look at research and development work on humanoid robots, artificial intelligence, and what they might mean for the future.

As the article concludes, "it seems clear that big changes are coming, and while humans — the flesh and blood type — usually manage to adapt to technological change, the period of adjustment can sometimes get pretty uncomfortable. As with any new technology, there will certainly be some unintended, and quite possibly unpleasant, consequences as robots begin to play a regular role in our day-to-day lives, USC's Mataric [Maja Mataric, a computer scientist and roboticist at the University of Southern California] notes. But she's confident that the potential benefits outweigh the risks. "I hope society is strong and wise enough to stop abuses without stopping science," she says, "but I think all of that is still a long way off." Before anyone has to start really worrying about our place in the future, the techies have a heck of a lot more work to do."

from the stuff-that-dreams-are-made-of dept.
vik writes "The BBC are carrying an article about successful experiments by Professor Daniela Rus and colleagues from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US, to produce a Utility Fog robot. They call them robotic molecules and the prototypes are 5cm cubes currently capable of moving in two dimensions. However they clearly recognise the 3D development path to Utility Fog and have created software to manage the morphing of one formation to another. There are also animations of the existing hardware in action and associated publications off the same link.