Nanoassembly by "hand": pick and place of nanotubes

A "nanohand" is a small gripper, small enough to manipulate nanotubes and nanofibres. This movie show how to pick and place nanofibres using a nanohand, to construct a nanodevice: a super-probe for atomic force microscopy. It takes a lot of work to get this far; and much more to get further: how about a virtual reality world where you can pick nanotubes with your own hands, while the nanogripper does it with 10000 times smaller fingers? How about an assembly line, a factory for building nanotube devices? Two big european projects, Nanorac and Nanohand, are now trying to make this reality.

The video was filmed by Volkmar Eichhorn at Oldenburg University in their cool nanorobot-in-a-microscope system, using the new microgrippers from DTU, designed by Kenneth Carlson.

The work was published here: Nanotechnology 18 2007, page 345501.

Want to know more? Check nanosystemsengineering.dk/index_pages/nanogripper.htm

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• nanotechnology
• nanomanipulation
• nanotubes
• microgripper
• nanogripper
• nanowires
• nanorobot
• nanoassembly

[bLackmarketRadio]

is this how you pluck nano-pubes?

[NanoClips]

@bLackmarketRadio how did you guess?

[NanoClips]

In these older films, we have to speed up the playback rate by a factor of 3-5, since we did the manipulation manually. When we run it automatically (yes - the nanoassembly line is here :-)... its much faster, i think, even faster than the sped-up view you see here. Ill see if i can get Volkmar to cough up some of the recent films :)

But... there are some other, pretty cool stuff coming up, when i get the time to edit the film ...

[Jenfucius]

WOW!

Nice video NanClips!

Now if they had thousands of these nano hands operated by computers they could theorectically start assembling small items.

[NanoClips]

That would be a bit difficult, but in principle - yes. Right now they can be mounted on small mobile robots (1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm), which drive around on a surface... but making them much smaller is not very practical. Nanorobots are much easier (although not easy) by modifying bacteria and vira (which are nanobots), or making artificial cells with micelles, and give them functions by attaching molecules to them. In contrast, the microgripper here works best in vacuum :)

[rimpick]

you know in Singapore on 6 15, 2009 they created a controllable gear thats about 1.2nm!

[NanoClips]

nice - molecular engineering is awesome. And if you *really* want to see something impressing then google salmonella or coli, together with flagellae - try to google "images". The propeller proteins of bacteria never cease to fascinate me.. molecular engineering at its best. (Im *not* creationist, nature just had a lot of time to perfect the job)

[flanchwerd]

This technology is too advanced for the mankind we DO NOT have the conscience to use it well and most of it is used to kill PPL at this hour!

[bommobiel]

What´s the name of the song? :)

[WhiteDragon103]

The music would have been better if it kept more of a pattern.

[Elvarks]

Is it realtime?

[kdomn37]

This was awesome thanks for sharing it!

[ace3esp]

i love the song whatever it is

[fnorgen]

awesome music