Nanotech Robotics Items

Rbotics the joint use of nanoelectronics, photolithography, and new biomaterials, can be considered as a possible way to enable the required manufacturing technology towards nanorobots for common medical applications, such as for surgical instrumentation, diagnosis and drug delivery.Indeed, this feasible approach towards manufacturing on nanotechnology is a practice currently in use from the electronics industry.So, practical nanorobots should be integrated as nanoelectronics devices, which will allow tele-operation and advanced capabilities for medical instrumentation.

Construction of Nanotechnology promises futuristic applications such as microscopic robots that assemble other machines or travel inside the body to deliver drugs or do microsurgery.These machines will face some unique physics. At small scales, fluids appear as viscous as molasses, and Brownian motion makes everything incessantly shake. Taking inspiration from the biological motors of living cells, chemists are learning how to power microsize and nanosize machines with catalytic reactions

Nanorobotics is an emerging field that deals with the controlled manipulation of objects with nanometer-scale dimensions. Typically, an atom has a diameter of a few Ångstroms (1 Å = 0.1 nm = 10-10 m), a molecule's size is a few nm, and clusters or nanoparticles formed by hundreds or thousands of atoms have sizes of tens of nm. Therefore, Nanorobotics is concerned with interactions with atomic- and molecular-sized objects-and is sometimes called Molecular Robotics. We use these two expressions, plus Nanomanipulation, as synonyms in this article.

Molecular Robotics falls within the purview of Nanotechnology, which is the study of phenomena and structures with characteristic dimensions in the nanometer range. The birth of Nanotechnology is usually associated with a talk by Nobel-prize winner Richard Feynman entitled "There is plenty of room at the bottom", whose text may be found in [Crandall & Lewis 1992]. Nanotechnology has the potential for major scientific and practical breakthroughs. Future applications ranging from very fast computers to self-replicating robots are described in Drexler's seminal book [

Nanotechnology is being pursued along two converging directions. From the top down, semiconductor fabrication techniques are producing smaller and smaller structures-see e.g. [Colton & Marrian 1995] for recent work. For example, the line width of the original Pentium chip is 350 nm. Current optical lithography techniques have obvious resolution limitations because of the wavelength of visible light, which is in the order of 500 nm. X-ray and electron-beam lithography will push sizes further down, but with a great increase in complexity and cost of fabrication. These top-down techniques do not seem promising for building nanomachines that require precise positioning of atoms or molecules.

Alternatively, one can proceed from the bottom up, by assembling atoms and molecules into functional components and systems. There are two main approaches for building useful devices from nanoscale components. The first is based on self-assembly, and is a natural evolution of traditional chemistry and bulk processing-see e.g. [Gómez-López et al. 1996]. The other is based on controlled positioning of nanoscale objects, direct application of forces, electric fields, and so on. The self-assembly approach is being pursued at many laboratories. Despite all the current activity, self-assembly has severe limitations because the structures produced tend to be highly symmetric, and the most versatile self-assembled systems are organic and therefore generally lack robustness. The second approach involves Nanomanipulation, and is being studied by a small number of researchers, who are focusing on techniques based on Scanning Probe Microscopy (abbreviated SPM, and described later in this article).

A top-down technique that is closely related to Nanomanipulation involves removing or depositing small amounts of material by using an SPM. This approach falls within what is usually called Nanolithography. SPM-based Nanolithography is akin to machining or to rapid prototyping techniques such as stereolithography. For example, one can remove a row or two of hydrogen atoms on a silicon substrate that has been passivated with hydrogen by moving the tip of an SPM in a straight line over the substrate and applying a suitable voltage. The removed atoms are "lost" to the environment, much like metal chips in a machining operation. Lines with widths in the order of 10 to 100 nm have been written by these techniques-see e.g. [Wiesendanger 1994] for a survey of some of this work. In this article we focus on Nanomanipulation proper, which is akin to assembly in the macroworld.

Nanorobotics research has proceeded along two lines. The first is devoted to the design and computational simulation of robots with nanoscale dimensions-see [Drexler 1992] for the design of robots that resemble their macroscopic counterparts. Drexler's nanorobot uses various mechanical components such as nanogears built primarily with carbon atoms in a diamondoid structure. A major issue is how to build these devices, and little experimental progress has been made towards their construction.

The second area of Nanorobotics research involves manipulation of nanoscale objects with macroscopic instruments. Experimental work has been focused on this area, especially through the use of SPMs as robots. The remainder of this article describes SPM principles, surveys SPM use in Nanomanipulation, looks at the SPM as a robot, and concludes with a discussion of some of the challenges that face Nanorobotics research.


Scanning Probe Microscopes

The Scanning Tunelling Microscope (STM) was invented by Binnig and Rohrer at the IBM Zürich laboratory in the early 1980s, and won them a Nobel prize four years later.