Tad Hogg and David W. Sretavan
Abstract
We designed and evaluated multiagent control for microscopic
robots (``nanorobots'') aiding the surgical repair of damaged
nerve cells. This repair operates on both nerves as a whole, at
scales of hundreds of microns, and individual nerve cell axons, at
scales of about a micron. We match the robots to these sizes using
a combination of microelectomechanical (MEMS) machines for the
larger operations and nanorobots for operations on individual
cells. Multiagent control allows accurate and rapid repair with
such robots, with only modest computational and communication
requirements for the nanorobots, a significant benefit due to
their physical limitations. Our simulations, using physical
parameters dictated by nerve biology and plausible nanorobotic
capabilities, show how specific control choices lead to trade-offs
in clinical outcome. Beyond the specific example of nerve repair
treated here, multi-scale robots could aid a variety of medical
and biological tasks involving both the large scale of organs or
tissues and the microscopic scale of individual cells.
Full paper (appeared in Proc. of AAAI-2005, pp. 1286--1291, 2005; www.aaai.org): nerveRepair.pdf
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