from the mechanoplankton dept.
According to a press release (9 January 2002), the Laboratory for Molecular Robotics (LMR) at the University of Southern California School of Engineering has received $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.
According to Ari Requicha, a USC professor of computer science and the project's principal investigator, the project spans the fields of nanotechnology, robotics, computer science and marine biology, but is centered on the development of the ultra-small robotic sensors and software systems to control them. Requicha said it will be possible to build nanoscale devices with electrical and mechanical components so that the devices could propel themselves, send electronic signals and even compute. While individual nanoscale devices would have limited computing power and capability, the plan is to have vast numbers of them operating in concert.
Requicha said that nanotechnology today is at the same stage of development as the Internet was in the late 1960's. "The idea that we'll have swarms of nanorobots in the ocean is no more far-fetched than the idea of connecting millions of computers was then," he said. "I don't think these robots will be confined to the ocean. We will eventually make robots to hunt down pathogens or repair cells in the human body."
Read more for additional details on this ambitious project. David Caron, professor of biological sciences and a co- investigator on the project, said ocean robots needn't be terribly complicated or powerful to be useful. A single robot might sense only whether the water is fresh or saline and communicate by a faint radio signal only with other robots closest to it, which would then relay the information to other robots in the network linked to the Internet by still more robots. In the next year, Caron hopes to attach an antibody to a [scanning] microscope tip. He recently created an antibody that binds to the toxic algae known as Brown Tide. "That test takes a day in the lab, which is an improvement over current testing, but it's still not fast enough," said Caron. The microscope should detect the algae the instant a microorganism binds to the antibody on its tip.
Requicha estimates that it will be a decade before the researchers can build and deploy nanoscale robots in the ocean capable of the kind of instant and specific test like Caron's for Brown Tide. Along the way, he hopes the project will spin off technology in marine biology and other areas. The end goal of the project will be to create robots that are as small as the microorganisms that they seek to monitor
"Today, we commonly do experiments with five or ten robots," said Gaurav Sukhatme, USC assistant professor of computer science and a co-investigator on the project. "But we'll need algorithms to coordinate a million or more robots. That is a daunting problem, and we must start laying out the foundations for large numbers of robots long before they are a reality."
Requicha said that nanotechnology today is at the same stage of development as the Internet was in the late 1960's. "The idea that we'll have swarms of nanorobots in the ocean is no more far-fetched than the idea of connecting millions of computers was then," he said. "I don't think these robots will be confined to the ocean. We will eventually make robots to hunt down pathogens or repair cells in the human body."
