Subatomic superhero? Scientists create robot with the nano touch - and it could lead to a gold rush
Chinese researchers help international team develop world’s first robot able to handle nano-sized objects
Tiny robots may soon be able to extract strands of DNA or clone animals with the speed of a car assembly line after a joint team from China and Canada recently developed the world’s first industrial robot with arms capable of picking up objects measuring just nanometers in length.
Some similar tasks can already be conducted by hand with the aid of microscopes, but they are time-consuming, labor-intensive and known to have high failure rates.
A team led by Professor Yu Sun at the University of Toronto in Canada claim to have made the breakthrough in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Harbin Institute of Technology.
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The robot was produced by HIT Robot Group in China’s northern Heilongjiang province. It cost more than six million yuan (US$940,000) to make and is about the size of a medium pizza.
One of the problems hindering research in this area has been that no motor was able to make the extremely small robotic arms perform the delicate movements required, the researchers said.
They solved this problem by connecting the robot’s arms to a special kind of electric motor called a piezo motor. This uses piezo ceramic materials that can be shrunk or expanded in size when charged with electric currents. The motors were able to move the arms in any direction to within 1 nanometre accuracy, they said.