The Design of Nanorobots
5 February 2008, 15:34
Categories: molecular-machines--devices
One of the major factors for successfully developing nanorobots is to bring together interdisciplinary professionals from chemistry, materials engineering, electronics, computing, physics, mechanics, photonics, pharmaceutics, and medicine technologies. To help this, researchers have developed a virtual reality simulator that enables interdisciplinary designers to explore how nanorobots might operate inside the human body. Adriano Cavalcanti, Bijan Shirinzadeh, Robert Freitas, Jr., and Tad Hogg, representing institutions in Australia and the U.S., have published their simulation procedure in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.
“The software NCD (nanorobot control design) is a system implemented to serve as a test bed for nanorobot 3D prototyping,” says Cavalcanti, CEO of the Center for Automation in Nanobiotech. “It is an advanced nanomechatronics simulator that provides physical and numerical information for nanorobot task-based modeling. Serving as a fast development platform for medical nanorobots investigation, the NCD simulations show how to interact and control a nanorobot inside the body.”
In a demonstration of the real-time simulation, the nanorobots had the task of searching for proteins in a dynamic virtual environment, and identifying and bringing those proteins to a specific “organ-inlet” for drug delivery. The researchers analyzed how the nanorobots used different strategies to achieve this goal.
Posted by: The Editors
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