Course Organization

The classes will be a mix of lectures by the instructor and student presentations. Classes are 1 hour and 20 min long. In a typical class, we will have one presentation, about 1 hour long, followed by 20 min of discussion. The last class(es) will consist of student project presentations.

Each week there will be assigned readings. All students are expected to read the material ahead of the class and be prepared to discuss it in class. A 12-point font, one-sheet summary and critique of the assigned material is due from each student at the beginning of the class. One summary per presentation will be required. You don’t need to submit a summary for a paper you are presenting. These summaries will be graded as acceptable/non-acceptable. Longer summaries will be returned with a non-acceptable grade. Summaries submitted late will be graded non-acceptable. The summaries should attempt to distill the most interesting ideas in the readings, point out strong and weak points in the material and relate it to the rest of the course. Sometimes several papers are assigned for a single presentation. Then a single summary is required for the presentation (not for the individual papers), and students should attempt to integrate the material in the various papers rather than report on each individual paper, both in the presentations and one-sheet summaries.

Each student is expected to make one or two presentations during the course. Please select one of the topics below and let the instructor know as soon as possible.

The plan is as follows.

#1 – January 10

Course organization. – Instructor.

Introduction to Self-Organization. – Instructor.

#2 – January 12

Introduction to Nanotechnology. – Instructor. (No summaries needed.)

January 17

No Class. (Holiday.)

#3 – January 19

D. J. Arbuckle and A. A. G. Requicha, “Self-assembly and self-repair of arbitrary shapes by a swarm of reactive robots: algorithms and simulations”, USC LMR Tech. Rept. AR-07, 2007. (Published in Autonomous Robots, Vol.28, No. 2, pp. 197-211, February 2010.) – Instructor.

#4 – January 24

G. Theraulaz, J. Gautrais, S. Camazine and J.-L. Deneubourg, “The formation of spatial patterns in social insects: from simple behaviors to complex structures”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. London A, Vol. 361, pp. 1263-1283, 2003. Available here. – Teawon Han.

#5 – January 26

W.-M. Shen, P. Will, A. Galstyan and C.-M. Chuong, “Hormone-inspired self-organization and distributed control of robotic swarms”Autonomous Robots, Vol. 17, pp.93-105, 2004.

M. Rubenstein and W.-M. Shen, “A scalable and distributed approach for self-assembly and self-healing of a differentiated shape”Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS ’08), Nice, France, September 22-26, 2008. – Ramchandra Karandikar.

#6 – January 31

A. L. Christensen, R. O’Grady and M. Dorigo, “SWARMORPH-script: a language for arbitrary morphology generation in self-assembling robots”, Swarm Intelligence, Vol. 2, Nos. 2-4, pp. 143-165, December 2008. – Luenin Barrios.

#7 – February 2

A. Kondacs, “Biologically-inspired self-assembly of two-dimensional shapes using global-to-local compilation”, IJCAI-03.

J. Cheng, W. Cheng and R. Nagpal, “Robust and self-repairing formation control for swarms of mobile agents”, AAAI-05. – Ekaansh Anand.

#8 – February 7

J. Werfel, D. Ingber and R. Nagpal, “Collective construction of environmentally-adaptive structures”, Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int’l Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS ’07), October 2007.

J. Werfel, Y. Bar-Yam and R. Nagpal, “Building patterned structures with robot swarms”, Proc. Int’l. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI ’05), August 2005. – Aditi Vedantam.

#9 – February 9

E. Klavins, “Directed self-assembly using graph grammars”Foundations of Nanoscience: Self Assembled Architectures and Devices, Snowbird, UT, 2004. – Brandon Angelo.

#10 – February 14

S. A. Hofmeyr, “An interpretative introduction to the immune system”, Chapter 1 of L. A. Segel and I. R. Cohen, Eds., Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2001. Available from the author’s web site. – Ekaansh Anand.

#11 – February 16

Introduction to atomic force microscopy. (No summaries needed.) – Instructor.

February 21

No class. (Holiday.)

#12 – February 23

S. Hauert, L. Winkler, J.-C. Zufferey and D. Floreano, “Ant-based swarming with positionless micro air vehicles for communication relay”, Swarm Intelligence, Vol. 2, Nos. 2-4, pp. 167-188, December 2008. Earlier version available also from the author’s lab web site, at this URL. – Brandon Angelo.

#13 – February 28

Propulsion at low-Reynolds number (Sir Geoff Taylor tape) – Instructor. (No summary needed.)

Diffusion (H. Berg, Random Walks in Biology, Ch. 1-6) – Instructor. (No summary needed.)

#14 – March 2

Resch et al., “Linking and manipulation of gold multi-nanoparticle structures using dithiols and scanning force microscopy”, J. Physical Chemistry B, Vol. 103, pp. 3647-3650, 1999.

S. Meltzer et al., “Fabrication of nanostructures by hydroxylamine-seeding of gold nanoparticle templates”, Langmuir, Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 1713-1718, March 6, 2001.

Harel et al., “Fabrication of polysterene latex nanostructures by nanomanipulation and thermal processing”, Nanoletters, Vol. 5, No. 12, pp. 2624-2629, December 2005.

L. Dong et al., “Nanorobotic spot welding: controlled metal deposition with attogram precision from copper-filled carbon nanotubes”, Nanoletters, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 58-63, January 2007. – Aditi Vedantam.

#15 – March 7

B. Mokaberi and A. A. G. Requicha, “Drift compensation for automatic nanomanipulation with scanning probe microscopes”, IEEE Trans. on Automation Science & Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 199-207, July 2006.

B. Mokaberi and A. A. G. Requicha, “Compensation of scanner creep and hysteresis for AFM nanomanipulation”, IEEE Trans. on Automation Science & Engineering, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 197-206, April 2008. – Luenin Barrios.

#16 – March 9

A. A. G. Requicha, D. J. Arbuckle, B. Mokaberi and J. Yun, “Algorithms and software for nanomanipulation with atomic force microscopes”, Int’l J. Robotics Research, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 512-522, April 2009.

H. Chen, N. Xi and G. Li, “CAD-guided automated nanoassembly using atomic force microscopy-based nanorobotics”, IEEE Trans. on Automation Science & Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 208-217, July 2006. – Aditi Vedantam.

March 14

No class. (Spring break.)

March 16

No class. (Spring break.)

#17 – March 21

Prater, Maivald, Kjoller and Heaton, “Probing nano-scale forces with the atomic force microscope”, DI Application Note AN08.

A. S. Lee, M. Mahapatro, D. A. Caron, A. A. G. Requicha, B. A. Stauffer, M. E. Thompson and C. Zhou, “Whole-cell sensing for a harmful bloom-forming microscopic alga by measuring antibody-antigen forces”, IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience, Vol. 5, No. 3, September 2006. – Teawon Han.

#18 – March 23

Resch et al., “Manipulation of nanoparticles using dynamic force microscopy: simulation and experiments”, Applied Physics A, Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 265-271, September 1998.

A. A. G. Requicha, “Nanomanipulation with the atomic force microscope”, in R. Waser, Ed. Nanotechnology, Volume 3: Information Technology. Weinheim, Germany: Wiley-VCH, 2008, pp. 239-273. (Up to, and including section X.3.2.) – Ekaansh Anand.

#19 – March 28

M. Currelli, R. Zhang, F. N. Ishikawa, H.-K. Chang, R. J. Cote, C. Zhou and M. E. Thompson, “Real-time, label-free detection of biological entities using nanowire-based FETs”, IEEE Trans. on Nanotechnology, Vol. 7, No. 6, pp. 651-667, November 2008. – Luenin Barrios.

#20 – March 30

J. Fritz, M. K. Baller, H. P. Lang, H. Rothuizen, P. Vettiger, E. Meyer, H.-J. Guntherodt, Ch. Gerber and J. K. Gimzewski, “Translating biomolecular recognition into nanomechanics, Science, Vol. 288, No. 5464, pp. 316-318, 14 April 2000.

T. P. Burg and S. R. Manalis, “Suspended microchannel resonators for biomolecular detection”, Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 83, No. 13, pp. 2698-2700, 29 September 2003.

K. Jensen, K. Kim and A. Zettl, “An atomic-resolution nanomechanical mass sensor”, Nature Nanotechnology, Vol. 3, No. 9, pp. 533-537, September 2008. – Teawon Han.

#21 – April 4

W. R. Browne and B. L. Feringa, “Making molecular machines work”, Nature Nanotechnology, Vol. 1, No. 10, pp. 25-35, October 2006. – Luenin Barrios.

#22 – April 6

A. Dhariwal, G. S. Sukhatme and A. A. G. Requicha, “Bacterium-inspired robots for environmental monitoring”, Proc. IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics & Automation (ICRA ’04), New Orleans, LA, pp. 1436-1443, April 25-30, 2004.

L. Zhang, J. J. Abbott, L. Dong, B. E. Kratochvil, D. Bell and B. J. Nelson, “Artificial bacterial flagella: fabrication and magnetic control”, Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 94, 064107, 2009.

S. Martell, M. Mohammadi, O. Felfoul, Z. Lu and P. Pouponneau, “Flagellated magnetotactic bacteria as controlled MRI-trackable propulsion and steering systems for medical nanorobots operating in the human microvasculature”, Int’l J. Robotics Research, Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 571-582, April 2009.

T. E. Mallouk and A. Sen, “Powering nanorobots”, Scientific American, pp. 72-77, 2009. – Teawon Han.

#23 – April 11

L. Dong, B. J. Nelson, T. Fukuda and F. Arai, “Towards nanotube linear servomotors”, IEEE Trans. on Automation Science & Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 228-235, July 2006.

B. Bourlon, D. C. Glattli, C. Miko, L. Forro and A. Bachtold,”Carbon nanotube based bearing for rotational motions”, Nanoletters, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 709-712, April 2004.

K. Jensen, C. Girit, W. Mickelson and A. Zettl, “Tunable nanoresonators constructed from telescopic nanotubes”, Physical Review Letters, Vol. 96, 215503, 2 June 2006. – Aditi Vedantam.

#24 – April 13

J.-J. Greffet, “Nanoantennas for light emission”, Science, Vol. 308, pp. 1561-1563, 10 June 2005.

J. A. Misewich, R. Martel, Ph. Avouris, J. C. Tsang, S. Heinze and J. Tersoff, “Electrically induced optical emission from a carbon nanotube FET”, Science, Vol. 300, pp. 783-786, 2 May 2003.

E. Cubukcu, E. A. Cort, K. B. Crozier and F. Capasso, “Plasmonic laser antenna”, Applied Physics Letters, Vol. 89, 093120, 2006.

K. Jensen, J. Weldon, H. Garcia and A. Zettl, “Nanotube radio”, Nanoletters, Vol. 7, No. 11, pp. 3508-3511, July 2007. – Ekaansh Anand.

#25 – April 18

I. F. Akyildiz, F. Brunetti and C. Blazquez, “Nanonetworks: a new communication paradigm”, Computer Networks, Vol. 52, pp. 2260-2279, 2008. (Skip sections 1-3.) – Brandon Angelo.

#26 – April 20

Z. L. Wang and J. Song, “Piezoelectric nanogenerators based on zinc oxide nanowires”, Nature, Vol. 312, pp. 242-246, 14 April 2006.

X. Wang, J. Song, J. Liu and Z. L. Wang, ” Direct-current nanogenerator driven by ultrasonic waves”, Science, Vol. 316, pp. 102-105, 6 April 2007.

B. Tian, X. Zheng, T. J. Kempa, Y. Fang, N. Yu, G. Yu, J. Huang and C. M. Lieber, “Coaxial silicon nanowires as solar cells and nanoelectronic power sources”, Nature, Vol. 449, pp. 885-889, 18 October 2007. – Brandon Angelo.

#27 – April 25

Project Reports.

#28 – April 27

Project Reports.

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