Nanorobotics – By Nazneen Sait
- What is Nanorobotics?
Ans: Nanorobotics is an emerging field that deals with the controlled manipulation of objects with nanometer-scale dimensions. As an atom has a diameter of a few Ångstroms (1 Å = 0.1 nm = 10-10 m), and a molecule´s size is a few nanometers, nanorobotics is concerned with interactions with atomic- and molecular-sized objects, and is sometimes called molecular robotics.
A nanorobot is a specialized nanomachine designed to perform a specific task or tasks repeatedly and with precision. Nanorobots have dimensions on the order of nanometers (a nanometer is a millionth of a millimeter, or 10-9 meter).
- What is a fractal robot?
Fractal robot is a new kind of robot made from motorized cubic bricks that move under computer control. These cubic motorized bricks can be programmed to move and shuffle themselves to change shape to make objects likes a house potentially in a few seconds because of their motorized internal mechanisms.
- What is the projected power of fractal OS?
The fractal operating system plays a crucial role in making the integration of the system seamless and feasible even if there are billions of CPUs in the collective.
A fractal operating system converts parallel fractally writtencode to execute in parallel order or serial order seamlessly by virtue of the fractal organisation of the data and programs. This allows increases in CPU horsepower to be automatically exploited when needed without having to rewrite code.
A fractal operating system uses a number of features to achieve these goals.
1. Seamless integration of software, data and hardware
2. Transparent data communications.
3. Data compression at all levels including communications
4. Awareness of built in self repair
- How will self repair work in fractal robots?
An advantage of the fractal operating system is that self repair feature is aware of failures and has routing built in to avoid faulty hardware.
There are three different kinds of self repair that can be employed in a fractal robot.
1)Cube replacement: The easiest to implement is cube replacement. Instead of discarding the cubes, the robot could reconfigure into a different machine and carry the broken parts within it. The faulty parts are moved to places where their reduced functionality can be tolerated.
2)Usage of plates to construct the cubes: If any robotic cubes are damaged, they can be brought back to the assembly station by other robotic cubes, dismantled into component plates, tested and then re-assembled with plates that are fully operational. Potentially all kinds of things can go wrong and whole cubes may have to be discarded in the worst case. But based on probabilities, not all plates are likely to be damaged, and hence the resilience of this system is much improved over self repair by cube level replacement.
3) Using smaller fractal machines to affect self repair inside large cubes:The third scheme for self repair involves smaller robots servicing larger robots. Since the robot is fractal, it could send some of its fractally smaller machines to affect self repair inside large cubes. This form of self repair is much more involved but easy to understand. If the smaller cubes break, they would need to be discarded - but they cheaper and easier to mass produce. With large collections of cubes, self repair of this kind becomes extremely important. It increases reliability and reduces down time.