Scientists aren't just interested in making robots which look like us.
They wanna... want them to get right under our skin, too.
Bring on the nanobots -- miniature medics and pharmacists able to get right to where they're needed, even inside our own bodies.
In this week's Make, Create, Innovate, Nick Glass discovers that while these little guys may be small, they are extremely powerful.
When we think of robots, we think of factory floors and science fiction movies.
Or, as we've shown you on past episodes of Make, Create, Innovate, the Roomba vacuum cleaner, or Bob the security guard.
In these underground research labs in Zurich in Switzerland, the approach has been radically different --
robots so small, so miniature, they're barely visible to the eye and able to go places almost beyond our imagination.
We're making micro- and nanorobots that are guided by externally generated magnetic fields for use in the human body.
Brad Nelson is a mechanical engineer that likes to think small -- very small.
He's a pioneer in a field that's only existed for the last decade or so -- nanorobotics.
[To] give you an idea of how small these are -- if I had a teaspoon, I could fit about 3 billion of them in a teaspoon. So, ...
Three billion? It's kind of unimaginable.
It is kind of unimaginable, yeah.
Well, the first challenges were how to make these things move.
The inspiration comes from nature, the E. coli bacterium in particular, which is propelled along by a rotating tail, or so-called flagellum.
Now, we can't make that motor. We don't have the technology for that.
But, what we brought in were some lessons we'd learned about magnetic fields and using magnetism to move these things.
So, we actually take these flagella and we magnetize them,
and then we have a special rotating field -- a special type of magnetic field we generate -- which allows them to swim.
Having cracked propulsion, Nelson and his team worked on refining how the nanobots moved,
how they danced -- a waltz, orchestrated on a nano scale.
The nanobots are all manufactured in ultra-clean rooms like this, specially lit for the purpose.
Machines to maneuver them about are also being designed and built.
The target market is health care.
What you see on the screen here is an image through our ophthalmic microscope of an artificial eye, and in the middle of that is what we call a microrobot.
It's about a third of a millimeter in diameter, about a millimeter or so long. So, very, very tiny.
So, this particular device [is] made to carry drugs.
And so, we can move it to any location on the retina, and then as it sits there, cause it to diffuse drugs off of it to [a] very particular location.
As well as our eyes, Nelson is targeting our hearts.
An operation to repair damaged heart tissue is already planned for later this year.
And from one vital organ to another, he hopes his machines could be used in the brain.
So, we've looked at applications, for instance, in deep brain stimulation and implanting electrodes in the brain, and we've looked at putting catheters within the vasculature of the brain.
And this could just be the beginning for Nelson's nanobots.
He believes they could help us environmentally, something microscopic to tackle. something massive, like an oil spill.
These are very small.
If we can create swarms of them that can go out, they can cover a broad area.
Water treatment, environmental cleanup, where you might be able to put hundreds, thousands, millions of these devices
and have them swim through polluted water, catalyze pollutants, and then collect them [back] later back.
That's a particular application that's exciting and that we're certainly focusing on here.