Nanorobotics is the technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the microscopic scale of a nanometer (10-9 meters). More specifically, nanorobotics refers to the still largely hypothetical nanotechnology engineering discipline of designing and building nanorobots. Nanorobots (nanobots, nanoids, nanites or nanonites) would be typically devices ranging in size from 0.1-10 micrometers and constructed of nanoscale or molecular components. As no artificial non-biological nanorobots have yet been created, they remain a hypothetical concept.
Nanorobotics theory Since nanorobots would be microscopic in size, it would probably be necessary for very large numbers of them to work together to perform microscopic and macroscopic tasks. These nanorobot swarms, both those which are incapable of replication (as in utility fog) and those which are capable of unconstrained replication in the natural environment (as in grey goo and its less common variants), are found in many science fiction stories, such as the Borg nanoprobes in Star Trek. The word "nanobot" (also "nanite", "nanogene", or "nanoant") is often used to indicate this fictional context and is an informal or even pejorative term to refer to the engineering concept of nanorobots. The word nanorobot is the correct technical term in the nonfictional context of serious engineering studies.
Some proponents of nanorobotics, in reaction to the grey goo scare scenarios that they earlier helped to propagate, hold the view that nanorobots capable of replication outside of a restricted factory environment do not form a necessary part of a purported productive nanotechnology, and that the process of self-replication, if it were ever to be developed, could be made inherently safe. They further assert that free-foraging replicators are in fact absent from their current plans for developing and using molecular manufacturing.
In such plans, future medical nanotechnology has been posited to employ nanorobots injected into the patient to perform treatment on a cellular level. Such nanorobots intended for use in medicine are posited to be non-replicating, as replication would needlessly increase device complexity, reduce reliability, and interfere with the medical mission. Instead, medical nanorobots are posited to be manufactured in hypothetical, carefully controlled nanofactories in which nanoscale machines would be solidly integrated into a supposed desktop-scale machine that would build macroscopic products.
The most detailed discussions of nanorobotics, including specific design issues such as sensing, power communication, navigation, manipulation, locomotion, and onboard computation, have been presented in the medical context of nanomedicine by Robert Freitas. Although much of these discussions remain at the level of unbuildable generality and do not approach the level of detailed engineering, the Nanofactory Collaboration[3], founded by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle in 2000, is a focused ongoing effort involving 23 researchers from 10 organizations and 4 countries that is developing a practical research agenda specifically aimed at developing positionally-controlled diamond mechanosynthesis and a diamondoid nanofactory that would be capable of building diamondoid medical nanorobots.
Nubot is an abbreviation for "Nucleic Acid Robots." Nubots are synthetic robotics devices at the nanoscale. Representative Nubots include the several DNA walkers reported by Ned Seeman's group at NYU, Niles Pierce's group at Caltech, John Reif's group at Duke University, Chengde Mao's group at Purdue, and Andrew Turberfield's group at the University of Oxford.
