The goal of the RoboBee project is to make a fully autonomous swarm of flying robots
for applications such as search and rescue and artificial pollination. To make this feasible, researchers need to figure out how to get power supply and decision making functions, which are currently supplied to the robot via a tiny tether, on board.
rvard scientists have introduced what may be the cutest flying robots ever: a bio-inspired insect-sized aircraft dubbed RoboBee that pushes flight-worthy craft into their smallest wings yet.
“To our knowledge this is the smallest flying robot so far,” said Pakpong Chirarattananon, co-lead of the paper in Science describing the 80-milligram robot with a 3-centimeter wingspan that’s hardly bigger than a penny.
Building such a tiny flying robot required marshaling an enormous amount of ingenuity -- and several engineering breakthroughs -- to overcome the challenges of working on the sub-millimeter level. Nuts and bolts prove unmanageable, and turbulence becomes a much bigger issue on such a small scale.
The researchers came up with a way to build the robots by tracing out patterns in flat sheets and then folding them into the desired shape. This approach allowed them to use different materials in sheets that they could glue together with relative ease.
The method is “a bit like the approach you use with origami,” Chirarattananon said. “And that enables us to create something that’s small and precise.”
The researchers had to build their own "muscles" for the tiny robotic bug. They came up with a tiny piezoelectric actuator -- thin ceramic strips that squeeze when a current is run through them, allowing the aircraft to flap its wings at 120 times per second.
The robots still don’t have their own brains -- even cellphone-sized microchips are too big for them -- and they don’t have their own power source. The tiny bugs had to be tethered with tiny power cords and they lasted about 10 to 15 minutes before the hinges on their wings gave out.
But once scientists come up with a way to give the bugs their own brains and energy source, such robo-flies could become very useful as tiny search-and-rescue vehicles inside buildings, Chirarattananon said, and perhaps even handy to help pollinate plants as colony collapse disorder continues to plague honeybee hives.
argely in the research and development phase,[8] but some primitive molecular machines and nanomotors have been tested. An example is a sensor having a switch approximately 1.5 nanometers across, capable of counting specific molecules in a chemical sample. The first useful applications of nanomachines might be in nanomedicine. For example,[9] biological machinescould be used to identify and destroy cancer cells.[10][11] Another potential application is the detection of toxic chemicals, and the measurement of their concentrations, in the environment. Rice University has demonstrated a single-molecule car developed by a chemical process and including buckyballs for wheels. It is actuated by controlling the environmental temperature and by positioning a scanning tunneling microscope tip.
Another definition is a robot thatA practical approach with advanced computer aided manufacturing analysis is presented for the problem of nanorobot assembly automation and instrumentation. The prototyping development concentrates its main focus on practical experimental nanorobot hardware manufacturing design and control system for intelligent pathological sensing and manipulation. Medical nanodevices provide a suitable way to enable the clinical treatment of patients with chronic diseases. Hence, the detailed projects use inside body 3D real time visualization and hardware verification techniques, addressing key aspects required to achieve successful integrated nanoelectronics product implementation.allows precision interactions with nanoscale objects, or can manipulate with nanoscale resolution. Such devices are more related to microscopy or scanning probe microscopy, instead of the description of nanorobots as molecular machine. Following the microscopy definition even a large apparatus such as an atomic force microscope can be considered a nanorobotic instrument when configured to perform nanomanipulation. For this perspective, macroscale robots or microrobots that can move with nanoscale precision can also be considered nanorobots.
