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Microrobot Developed at Dartmouth
TheSync writes "Dartmouth researchers have developed the world's smallest untethered, controllable microrobot. The microrobot is much smaller and less massive than previous controllable microrobots. It measures only 60 by 250 micrometers. It receives power and control signals from the grid of electrodes it walks on, and moves by bending its body like a caterpillar. Not quite nanomachines, but we are getting closer!"
The microrobot is much smaller as less massive than previous controllable microrobots.
Do you even glance at these before hitting "publish"?
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anything. It's it great the way we always hear about groundbreaking achievements that "could" be used in future applications, but we never actually hear about the applications? Just once I'd like to see a press release where the scientists say "and it can do this useful function right now which we intend to start a spinoff company to commercialise."
How we know is more important than what we know.
"At very small scales, this machine is surprisingly fast."
I just thought that was pretty funny. I mean, at pretty small scales a sloth is a speeding bullet. But his point obviously is that it has a large speed to size ratio.
And did anyone else notice that during the video linked in the article as he says, "These robots are maybe 10x the size of human blood cells", while the video shows red blood cells on the machine. It's clear from the image that what he is saying is clearly not true. Maybe just bad editing.
And what's the wear-lifetime of a such a small device? And how does a "microrobot" mean that we're "one step closer to a nanorobot"? The article makes no such claim, and such an extraordinary decrease in size--at least factor a billion in terms of volume--is so dramatic it boggles the mind that it was even suggested. Let me give a good idea about the feasibility of "nanorobots": nature has been shrinking critters for /billions/ of years, look to their level of functionality, i.e. what does a bacterium do? what does a virus do? what does a prion do? to get an idea of what "nanorobots" would be capable of.
Not to say that this technology won't be useful for something beyond very short races, but I wish enthusiatsts would understand that nanotechnology will *not* involve *robots*. At the scale of this experiment, solids may be manipulated much like they can at our scale, but liquids behave quite differently because of surface tension. At the scale of nano-technology you're dealing with individual molecules, and *everything* behaves differently. You simply can't manipulate molecules as if the were boxes on an assembly line, as the forces that chemistry works with completely dominate forces such as gravity and friction at that scale.
We know *exactly* what an efficient nano-scale manipluator of molecules looks like - we call it an enzyme. If it takes a set of molecular manipulations (also called chemical reactions) in a certain order to build the result you desire, and you can make an enzyme which catalyzes each manipulation, then you're done. There's no additional benefit in glueing these enzymes together to make a robot.
You might want a device that makes these enzymes in the right proportion at a controlable location, and that is self-reproducing until some signal is received, and self-removing when another is received. We call such things "cells" today, but I guess we could also call them "nano-robots" if it made people happy.
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