Nanorobots: Machines Squeezed between Molecular Motors and Micromotors

Abstract

The development of a new set of tools is often a culminating point in humanity's understanding and harnessing of nature. So-called ''micro/nanomotors'' are artificial machines that convert chemical energy to propulsion and have already served as building blocks for many futuristic applications. With the never-ending push toward miniaturization in every aspect, the combined recent efforts of multiple disciplines will create genuinely nanosized artificial machines, with all dimensions below 1,000 nm. However, there is a strong fundamental and methodological barrier in the creation and utilization of nanomachines that sets them apart from their microscale counterparts: the strong dominance of Brownian forces and the difficulty of analyzing their motion. In this review, we critically assess the new fully nanosized robots and compare them with current microrobot technology and applications.

Trends in Micro‐/Nanorobotics: Materials Development, Actuation, Localization, and System Integration for Biomedical Applications

“…The trajectories originate from the guided actuation, and in some cases, should be assessed by analyzing the statistics, instead of by intuitive evaluation. [ 108 ]…”

Is order creation through disorder in additive manufacturing possible?

“…However, there are applications in drug delivery (Bandari et al, 2020;Medina-Sanchez et al, 2018). Other applications, presented in Figure 8, of these nano-metric entities are considered by Novotný et al (2020).…”

Ionic Species Affect the Self-Propulsion of Urease-Powered Micromotors

“…It is worth mentioning that different motion dynamics can be observed depending on the particle size [21,42]. Whereas submicron particles display enhanced diffusion, micron-sized motors show a propulsive and directional motion [21,43], like Pt-based Janus micromotors.…”

“…Although nanosized motors do show enhanced diffusion in ionic media, micron-sized motors present directional motion for longer time scales, and hence, the effect of electrolytes could be rather different [21,42,43]. Thus, determining the effect of ionic species on the motion of micron-sized enzymatic motors is of relevance in the field, not only to evaluate their performance in ionic media but also to compare with previous fundamental studies and elucidate their motion mechanism [21,31,32,35,38].…”