Self-assembly is expected to become a dominant fabrication technique for the nanodevices and systems of the future. Traditional, or passive, self-assembly techniques have great difficulty in designing individual components to produce the asymmetric structures needed by the applications. We are developing new self-assembly methods that use active assembly agents (robots). We have shown that swarms of such robots that communicate only by very simple messages can be programmed to form either wholly or partially specified structures, with the construction process possibly involving sacrificial components or scaffolds. The assembly agents have small memory and communication requirements and interact only when they are in contact. They are good models for future nanorobots, which are likely to communicate chemically.
A video simulation is available by clicking below. It shows about 10,000 robots constructing a collision-free path between a source and a destination (or, equivalently, building a wire connecting the source to the destination).
Reference: D. J. Arbuckle and A. A. G. Requicha, “Active Self-Assembly“, IEEE Int’l Conf. on Robotics and Automation, New Orleans, LA, April 25-30, 2004.
Download video. This is a .avi file about 27.5MB long.
