Nanobots are not smart...yet

By R Cairney, ExpressNews Staff

Dr. Aristides Requicha

March 26, 2002 - Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots being enlisted to aid your immune system as it identifies and attacks an infection; think of the profound social and economic changes that self-assembling nanodevices could bring about. Because it is such a new field, claims about what advances can be made using nanotechnology are limited only by the imagination. In a lecture to University of Alberta faculty and students Monday, Dr. Aristides Requicha spoke about the brave new world of nanorobotics--the world of molecule-sized robots.

In a talk that was equal parts humour, speculation and up-to-date research, the director of the University of Southern California's Laboratory for Molecular Robotics discussed the endless possibilities of nanoresearch.

Citing health care as an enormous area for applications of nanotechnology, Requicha predicted a future in which our natural defences are bolstered by technology.

"You might be able to detect pathogens very early and have millions of these (man-made) organisms in your body happily replicating. You'd never even know that you were about to get sick," he said.

"A lot of this is getting very 'blue sky,' but I dream of making an artificial immune system."

So far, in nanorobotics, almost everything is just a dream. No one has really accomplished much of anything. Requicha showed video images of a biological nanobot created by Japanese researchers. The device resembled a helicopter with one blade that went around in circles until it ran out of gas. Other researchers have managed to use light to push a microscopic ring.

Requicha and his team of researchers have become adept at manipulating molecules, moving small balls of gold into a single line to form a wire, or arranging the balls to spell USC.

None of these accomplishments appears to have any practical use, but Requicha had some practical advice for researchers in the new field: "Just make something move, okay?"

In a nanorobotics class he teaches, Requicha looks to ants and bacteria for inspiration. Individually, neither an ant nor a single bacterium is remarkably intelligent, he said. But in groups, they can accomplish marvelous feats.

Bacteria find nutrients though a random series of movements, changing their direction of travel less frequently in healthy environments and more frequently when food is scarce. Randomness, Requicha says, plays a significant role in their success. And success in nanorobotics will depend upon our ability to mimic the natural world.

"If we build a nanorobot it isn't going to be very fancy. It is not going to have 'Pentium Inside'. It won't have an ethernet connection. But you need some form of co-ordination and co-operation. So how do you co-ordinate a large number of things that, individually, are kind of dumb? These animals and organisms do get things done. That shows that you can program very simple robots in ways that use randomness actively."

Because nanotechnology is such a new field, he added, the U of A is getting into the area at the right time. The National Research Council has located its National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) at the U of A. "This is the time to do it," he said. "If you wait a couple of years it will be too late."


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