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Nano-motors For Microbots
Smivs writes "The BBC are reporting on the development of tiny motors the size of a grain of salt which could power surgical Microbots.
Some surgical procedures are hindered by the size or inflexibility of current instruments. For example, the labyrinthine network of blood vessels in the brain prevents the use of catheters threaded through larger blood vessels.
Researchers have long envisioned that trends of miniaturisation would lead to tiny robots that could get around easily in the body.
The problem until now has been powering them.
Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size. As they approach millimetre dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings. Now, research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has demonstrated a motor about 1/4mm wide, about the width of two human hairs."
I for one, welcome our new surgical microbot wielding medical overlo--I mean "doctors".
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
a motor about 1/4mm wide, about the width of two human hairs."
Seriously? People are unable to visualize mm?
Who can pass basic schooling without ever using a ruler?
Maybe their's was marked in human hairs, however gross that would be. Maybe the next unit was a finger? An eye?
"tiny motors the size of a grain of salt which could power surgical Microbots"
Or, they could power grains of salt. Hours of fun at the dinner table.
Task Mangler
I'd be impressed to see the bearings of a millimeter-sized engine.
Can I finally have my artery-clearing, cancer-attacking, medicine-carrying, and blood-clotting robots that will imediately improve my lifespan, quality of life, and allow me to eat all the cheese potato chips I like?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Am I the only one who can't help but think of the parasites Fry got from the sandwich?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Now they can make the worlds smallest animatronic singing bass fish.
(bearing) resistance is futile.
0.25mm is hardly nanoscale. It's not even milli-scale!
Isn't that still too big to get through a capillary? Eventually they'll still get stuck somewhere, I'd imagine, and then you get a little tiny blood clot in a capillary. Maybe that's not a problem in the brain, I don't know. I still don't think you'd want millions of them blocking random capillaries and killing random nerve cells.
The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures (Junius)
You, Sir, have obviously read TFA, and thus is far superior to the rest of Slash... I mean, Collective.
You will be assimilated to serve as a bridge between the hairless apes and the overlords.
You will be named "Rublecutus of Borg".
From TFA:
Take a look however at the motors, and there are few changes from the motors available in the 1950s.
Er, maybe the basic design is similar, but motors are extraordinarily smaller (such as the 5mm wide specimens used in radio control kits nowadays) and there are new designs as well, such as stepper motors.
I think this article slightly exaggerates to make this seem more exciting...
Another random thought: this article assumes that a rotating motor is still needed, but why? If bacteria and other things move around by other means, maybe the only efficient methods of movement at small scales are NOT rotating?
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
Just send a second brain robot, to clear away the first. It's like the financial crisis really, when you get into problems due to loose lending, lend more money to get out of the crisis. An absolute no brainer.
Insert disk with drivers for SuperAwesome nanomotor and press a key to continue.
fortune favors the lucky
I am not a molecular technologist. However I'm fair sure that "grain of salt" does not equal "nano"
This post is LAW where prohibited by VOID. Prosecutors will be violated.
Just power them like RFID. Put some wire coils on the back and induce current in the coils with EM flux.
If my underwear has this technology, surely these medical researchers can get a hold of it.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
As a person in psychology, I think these advances could yield different and/or more precise diagnostic tests for people suffering from psychological illnesses. It may lead to a better understanding of how the brain works. It could lead to many exciting studies in the neuro-psychological field. Now the questions are, what will be done with them and once we are done doing whatever it is we are doing with the microbots, how do we get them out?
If you do the math, the prospects for tiny motors is supremely dismal.
You see there's a basic problem-- the torque goes down as the cube of the motor's length, while the friction goes down as the square. In addition magnetics don't work well when you get down to the size of magnetic domains.
By the time you get down to the grain of salt size, motors can just barely overcome friction. Any smaller and they can't even turn over. You might notice in TFA there's no clear indication they've gotten one to rotate at all. Not surprising.
I would not bet any agricultural properties on this.
There is plenty of room at the bottom.
No. You could as easily say it was octal or hexadecimal.
Clearly, Base 10 obviously refers to the identity theorem. It means you use whatever base is convenient.
Just, before you do, you have to declare...
"All your bases are belong to 10...."
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I'm one of the 'experts' from QinetiQ who was asked to comment on this.
For those who are interested in the technical detail, the motor comprises an off the shelf piece of PZT (piezoelectric), which is glued to a specially shaped (by EDM if you are interested) helical piece of metal, shaped such that when it's excited axially, it will also tend to rotate (as you would expect from a helix). The up and down, coupled with a rotating backwards and forwards makes things move if you get the relative phases right. Bit like a USM motor you might find in a camera lense.
It was tested by balancing a small ball bearing on the end, and measuring the rotation of the ball under drive. It went respectably fast (sorry, I forget exactly how quick).
What the article doesn't mention is that to run something like this you need drive electronics, and as always - power. These two are likely to increase the practical system volume by an order of magnitude.