Microrobots Coming Soon for Human Bodies

Tiny robots self-assemble with a single command

Image UCSB.edu

Kristina Grifantini
Technology Review by MIT

Imagine a swarm of microrobots—tiny devices a few hair widths across—swimming through your blood vessels and repairing damage, or zipping around in computer chips as a security lock, or quickly knitting together heart tissue. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and Duke University have shown how to use a single electrical signal to command a group of microrobots to self-assemble into  larger structures. The researchers hope to use this method to build biological tissues. But for microrobots to do anything like that, researchers must first figure out a good way to control them.

"When things are very small, they tend to stick together," says Jason Gorman, a robotics researcher in the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST who co-organizes an annual microrobotics competition that draws groups from around the world. "A lot of the locomotion methods that have been developed are focused on overcoming or leveraging this adhesion."

So far, most control methods have involved pushing and pulling the tiny machines with magnetic fields. This approach has enabled them to zoom around on the face of a dime, pushing tiny objects orswim through blood vessels. However, these systems generally require complex setups of coils to generate the electromagnetic field or specialized components, and getting the robots to carry out a task can be difficult.

Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke, took a different approach, developing a microrobot that responds to electrostatic potential and is powered with voltage through an electric-array surface. Now he and others have demonstrated that they are able to control a group of these microrobots to create large shapes. They do this by tweaking the design of each robot a little so that each one responds to portions of the voltage with a different action, resulting in complex behaviors by the swarm.

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Your children will live to see man merge with machines. But will it save or destroy us?

Ian Morris,
Stanford History Professor
Daily Mail

Last week, historian Ian Morris revealed how, at the end of the last Ice Age, a simple accident of geography gave the West the advantages that led to it dominating the world for the past two centuries.

His argument forces us to accept that our success was nothing to do with superior brains, leaders or culture – and that the East is on the brink of taking over.

That idea may be hard to get used to, but Morris says it will be easy compared with the astounding changes in technology and health that are just around the corner...

When we imagine what life will be like over the next century, many people worry how the rise of the East will affect our lives in the West. They need not bother: the reality is that by the year 2100 our planet will have changed out of all recognition and even the concept of East and West may be meaningless.


In an interview in 2000, the economist Jeremy Rifkin suggested that: ‘Our way of life is likely to be more fundamentally transformed in the next several decades than in the previous thousand years.’

But this is, in fact, an understatement.

By my calculations, social development will rise twice as much between now and 2050 as in the previous 15,000 years; and by 2100 it will double again.

By 2100 we can anticipate cities of 140 million people – picture Tokyo, Mexico City, New York, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, New Delhi and Shanghai all rolled into one.

We should imagine armies with five times the destructive power of today’s, which probably means not more nuclear arms but weapons that make our intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombs and guns as obsolete as the machine gun made the musket.

Robots will do our fighting. Cyber warfare will be decisive. Nanotechnology will turn everyday materials into deadly weapons.

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