"In the short term, these micro-robots could be used to deliver cancer drugs (or any kind of medication) in a highly-targeted fashion, rather than the carpet bombing approach that is currently used"
You can almost always find the cancer therapy tie-in with these kinds of things. In this case "near term" would be 15-20 years at best. Getting stuff inside of cells without the immune system going caveman on your nanobot along the way is a hard problem.
Inside cells? That certainly is way off - but things like getting chemotherapy drugs mostly to the organ or body part that is cancerous should be much easier.
This still has massive hurdles. If you're going to have nanobots running around in your bloodstream, you need to protect them from the immune system. Worst case, you might have a massive immune response against the nanobots that causes a person to go into anaphylaxis. Somehow, you have to make them biologically inert without affecting our ability to control them or have them work.
There is some success using antibodies to deliver targeted therapies to certain organs, but in general, this drug delivery is a very hard problem. If we were able to solve it, then we would easily cure cancer. There are tons of chemicals that are toxic to the body as a whole, but would work great if you could narrowly target to the tissue or cells of interest.
Yeah, similar tech was demonstrated earlier this year I think -- little balls that carried anti-cancer drugs to tumors in mice. I think they were controlled with magnets.
Doesn't sound like self-assembly to me - isn't that simply some magnetic particles sticking to a magnet (or as close to the magnet as possible)? Too bad the videos don't show the magnets involved.
@Tichy That is correct, this doesn't seem to be the most
advanced form of Self-assembly but it could be an important
step towards making a system that, as a whole, is capable of
Self-Reconfiguration (Self-assembly=>Self-Disassemble=>
Self-assembly in to something new)
Imagine a large number of basic building blocks, and a smaller
numbers of of assemblers capable of moving the blocks around.
The individual units would not be capable of Self-Reconfiguration
but the system as a whole would be. It could transform it self
from one state to another state by using the assemblers to
move the building blocks around.
To make the units capable of reconfiguration on their own
or to build a system that is capable of reconfiguration is a
fundamental question in the research field of Self-reconfiguring
modular robotics
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-reconfiguring_modular_robo...)
that I find absolutely amazing and that are making great progress
in research and where we are even starting to see some commercial
products beginning to appear.
It looks like a neat technique, it just doesn't feel very self-assembly or even robotic to me. Maybe there is just not enough information in the article about what is really going on. Like what happens when one of the things turns into an "U" to wrap the item to move. Is there a magnet shaped like an U in the background? Or something more clever?
You can almost always find the cancer therapy tie-in with these kinds of things. In this case "near term" would be 15-20 years at best. Getting stuff inside of cells without the immune system going caveman on your nanobot along the way is a hard problem.