Industrial Robots Shrinking to Nanoscale

Posted 30 Oct 2006 at 05:10 UTC by steve

A new Robotic Industries Association article points out that as manufactured products shrink in size, so do their components. Many components used in industrial manufacturing have shrunk below the size that can be manipulated by humans already and many parts are rapidly heading toward nanoscopic size. This requires smaller and smaller robots to handle these tiny parts and assemble them into working products ranging from mobile phones to mass spectrometers. Nano-manipulators are commonly integrated into scanning electron microscopes today. Semiconductor manufacturers use nanotechnology robots to manipulate contacts that are as small as 100 nanometers (and getting smaller). The article lists many more examples of the growing number of micro and nano scale robots turning up many fields including medical technology, chemical engineering, even the airline security.