Research

As nanotechnology advances with tremendous promises to offer society, the coming of nanorobots seems inevitable. According to the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), the third and fourth generations of nanotechnology require technologies to design and control systems of nanorobots for self-assembly. Cavalcanti and Freitas designed a complex mechanical version of nanorobots comprising of robotic molecular-manipulator arms, fins and propellers for navigation, a macrotransponder navigation system, and communication sensors for occasionally explicit communication among nanorobots. These nanorobots may not be available until their advanced generation. The early version of future nanorobots potentially contains only essential characteristics for their tasks.

Like social insects, swarm intelligence arises from collaboration through interactions among simple individuals exhibiting simple behaviours. Swarm intelligence techniques can potentially be used to control such early-stage nanorobots with limited capabilities. In this study, the potential features of future nanorobots are identified and explored in biological systems as self-assembly processes are found commonly in nature. These nanorobot characteristics are kept as minimal as possible in order to simulate the early-stage nanorobots. A nanorobot swarm system called NARSS is built to model nanorobot control using a technique based on swarm intelligence and used to investigate the use of swarm intelligence to control modelling nanorobot on self-assembly and self-repair tasks in surface coatings (single-layered coating, layering and patterning). The performance of the system is validated in simulation on self-assembly tasks and can be determined by two factors: accuracy and speed of self-assembly. Through modelling, the purpose of this study is to investigate the minimal characteristics that are required for future nanorobots. Moreover, this study may allow us to estimate the potential speed of self-assembly and to identify the potential problems in the future nanorobots for self-assembly based on experiments in the simulation of NARSS.