The tiny robots will see you now

Over the past week, we’ve highlighted a lot of big, impressive robots. Now it’s time to pay homage to their teeny, tiny counterparts.

It’s science-fiction-turned-reality: Researchers are developing micro and nanoscale robots that move freely in the body, communicate with each other, perform jobs, and degrade when their mission is complete. These tiny robots will someday “have a major impact” on disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, according to a new review in Science Robotics from a top nanoengineering team at the University of California, San Diego.

The review highlights four areas of medicine where tiny robots have been successfully used in proof-of-concept studies: targeted delivery, precision surgery, sensing of biological targets, and detoxification. Of those, “active drug delivery is primarily the most promising commercial application of medical microrobots,” said paper co-author Joseph Wang, chair of nanoengineering at UCSD, in an email to IEEE Spectrum. In December, for example, researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland showed that a wire-shaped nanorobot could be wirelessly steered toward a location and then triggered by a magnetic field to release drugs to kill cancer cells.

To get to know these little machines better before we meet them in the doctor’s office, here are five things to know about micro- and nanorobots:

1. They are hard to move—and even harder to power.

2. They can perform surgery.

3. They’ll cooperate via swarm intelligence.

4. They’re designed to destroy themselves after completing a mission.

5. They’re being used in live animals.

Source: IEEE Spectrum