Tiny and Small Robots Electronics are shrinking rapidly. This has advantages in many different areas. One which I had not thought of to be honest, is the area of exploration. You may wonder how electronics getting smaller can aid in exploration and I have a very good example to give you. The Egyptian government is very careful when it come to letting explorers check-our their monuments and grave sites. The Great pyramid has been of special interest to explorers, but in some cases they have been stymied by the fact there are small shafts running through the pyramid and they can’t figure out what is at the end of them or what is it they may be passing through. There are blockages at the ends of the shafts in many cases. Archaeologists have put small robots into the shafts, but even they are often too large to be of much use. Enter the era of tiny electronics. What archaeologists would like to do is drill a hole with a maximum width of 1.5 inches in some areas and use this to put a tiny robot through. I don’t know if the Egyptians would allow this and my gut feeling is they would not, but even if they don’t there might be areas in the Great pyramid which have tiny cracks or crevices which a tiny device may be able to get through in the future as devices get really small. Another area tiny electronics would be very useful in is our bodies. There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about tiny devices which are so small they could devour cancer cells. They would be some sort of chomping robot which could sort out the healthy cells from the sick ones. One of the things scientists hope to accomplish with tiny robots is develop a new way to communicate with them. What they want to do is enable them to communicate in the same way bacteria does. This would be very helpful inside the human body. Scientists have found bacteria have a way to communicate which uses chemicals. The idea would be for the tiny robots to learn from a cell which one is healthy and which one is cancerous and let the other tiny robots know. There have even been suggestions this could be done in a day or two and the tiny robots would accomplish their jobs and leave the body in our waste. We might not even know they had done their jobs until medical test results showed this. I have even heard of tiny robots being thought about which could repair eyesight. There are so many medical uses for a perfected tiny robot on the cellular scale. While it would not happen in the near future, because we still have too much to learn, it has been said we might be able to program tiny robots to rewire the human brain making it far more efficient. Could tiny robots act as neurons and increase the amount of neurons in a brain? This might not be so far-fetched in the future. The military has begun to think of small robots as weapons. They would love to develop an insect sized robot which could be used in a swarm attack. The military has been playing with the idea of swarm attacks for some time before the idea of robot swarm attacks. The U.S. Navy is experimenting with using small boats the size of two or three-man boats to attack an enemy’s ships. In 2014 they conducted tests on the James River in Virginia. Small drones are being weaponized which can be controlled by an Abrams tank crew. They can carry ammunition and conduct reconnaissance. It is the insect sized drones which will be the most dangerous if they get perfected. The idea is to install a stinger on each robotic insect which can carry any type of drug. It could be a drug to render someone unconscious or even kill them. Think of this, thousands of robotic insects which have only one command and it is to sting the closest person. You can’t really shoot them all down. There will probably be some sort of counter measure to this type of attack developed however. One use for very small robots is in a rescue mission after a disaster. Take earthquake victims for example. Many of them are buried under rubble. The same thing might happen after a tornado or hurricane. Sometimes it is very hard to dig under the rubble to look for people and even very time consuming, because that same time could be used to rescue people we know are somewhere. With a small robot it could crawl between the rubble and look around for survivors. It might also be equipped with sensitive listening equipment so it could pick up sounds in nearby areas. This would free up people for rescue missions where victims are known to be. This makes for a much more efficient rescue mission. One person watching monitors and controlling the small robots could take the place of many diggers. Insect control is another area with a really small robot swarm might be very useful. Exterminators of the future may not need to spread poison around a home, but merely release thousands of small roach sized rubber skinned flexible robots which have only one mission which is to track down and destroy insects in your home. Bigger ones might be useful for getting rid of mice and rats. This would be one area where killer robots would be welcome. We could have a roach and ant terminator and a mouse and rat terminator and I don’t think anyone would object. Scientists have been thinking about the bee problem, which is honey bees seem to be dying out. The cause seems to be the poison used to kill crop pests. They are attempting to develop robot bees to pollinate the crops. Bees are responsible for pollinating many of our food crops and without them mankind could starve. The robot bees are fittingly being called RoboBees. While the main purpose of these robotic bees is pollination it has also been suggested they could be used for search and rescue. The day is coming when robots will range in size from microscopic to far larger than a person. We have to get used to this idea, because technology is marching on and the day may come when we will not be able to tell a robot from a human, because they will be in an android body and look and act like us. |
