Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
Micro-robotics
Computer Scientist Sergej Fatikow on the variety of microrobots, possibilities for their application, and current research challenges
First of all we have to define „micro/nano robotics“. Is it about the robot size? Is it about the precision the robot can operate with? Or is it about the size of objects the robot can manipulate or handle in some way? Different research communities have different views that depend on the application – the ability of the robot, which is essential for successful implementation of a particular task. Generally “microrobotics” deals with small-scale robots, the size of which varies from micrometers to centimeters.
Basic classification of microrobotics focuses on the essential features of the microrobot, which are required for the aspired performance. On the one hand, we design and apply robots capable of manipulating or positioning with a precision at micro/nano scale – high-precision microrobots.
You deal with such robots, if you are interested in handling a nanowire with the thickness of about 1000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair, or you want to touch an electrical path to do electrical characterization on a microchip, and the width of this path is just 10nm, or you try to implement injection or extraction into/from a biological cell.
Moreover, you want to perform these and similar tasks in an automatic way and without tedious manual control, exactly as regular industrial robots operate in a factory. These examples show the idea behind of high-precision microrobotics.
On the other hand, various research communities address applications where long-range mobility is the crucial feature of a robot. The “long-range” is to be seen in relation to the robot size, of course. For a micrometer-scale robot, the operation distance of several cm is long-range distance. Those are mobile microrobots.
For example, many labs look into development of very small drones or very small crawling robots, or very small fish-like robots for monitoring in different environments. Medical microrobotics is another large research area dealing with robots for operating inside the human body.
Microrobots can use the natural pathways in the human body, like blood vessels or gastrointestinal tract, for diagnosis and treatment, to deliver drugs to a particular area of the body. The latter is part of so-called targeted medicine. These and similar applications are in focus of mobile microrobotics.
And as always have a chilled day from the Viking
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