Comments on: Feynman’s Path to Nanotech (part 1)

By: Tyrone Slothrop

Tyrone Slothrop — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 02:56:28 +0000

As an undergraduate in engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1982, I was privileged to hear Professor Feynman speak. His talk was both funny and provocative. To illustrate one of his topics, he passed around a micro motor encased in lucite. If I recall corectly, the motor was about 0.5mm and required a strong magnifying glass to see it spinning. Half a millimeter? How primitive!

By: John L. Scott

John L. Scott — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:18:10 +0000

Robert Heinlein described this very idea in his short story “Waldo”. This was in 1942 so we really ought to call this “Heinlein’s Path to Nanotechnology”.

By: LS

LS — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:41:20 +0000

I really hesitate to go up against the likes of Richard P., (he was a hero to us when I was a physics grad student 40 years ago), but it’s not likely that his idea will be useful at really small scales. Too many factors come into play that you don’t think about when you imagine scaling down things that are useful at macroscale.

Think about “The Incredible Voyage”. It’s easy to imagine a miniature submarine cruising through the bloodstream, but if you could really build such a thing, it would be subject to such a molecular bombardment (think Brownian motion) that such a machine would be useless.

Macro thinking just won’t cut it at the micro scale, certainly not at the nano scale.

By: M. Report

M. Report — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:37:28 +0000

The Master/Slave hands are called “Waldos”,
after the title character in a 1942 Heinlein
novella; The iterative miniaturization concept
is also in that story.
Today it is called Telepresence, and has been fully
implemented on the human scale, including the last critical ability, tactile feedback.

Control circuitry would be simpler, and easier
to fab, if it were analog thermionic; Based on
vacuum tube op-amp designs.

By: Tyrone Slothrop

Tyrone Slothrop — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:34:22 +0000

As an engineering undergraduate at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in 1982, I heard a talk by Professor Feynman. His talk was funny and challenging. He passed around a miniature motor encased in lucite, which required a powerful magnifying glass to see it spinning. If I remember correctly, it was about 0.5 mm in size. How primitive!

By: Rob

Rob — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:00:14 +0000

Don’t forget that Robert Heinlein actually described this idea, of using small manipulators to create even smaller ones, in his 1942 short story Waldo.

By: Michael Kuntzman

Michael Kuntzman — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 17:30:27 +0000

About a month ago I read a presentation about a MEMS 6-DOF manipulator. Its range of motion is very limited, and it’s work area is small compared to the total area of the device, but it’s a step in the right direction. They estimate it would take at least 10 years to commercialize this.

The work is from April 2008, and is available here:
http://tvalley.nl/fckfiles/file/UTwente_-_Dannis_gehele_presentatie.pdf
Very interesting.

By: John Faith

John Faith — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:50:39 +0000

Another benefit I see of having a first-generation, micron-scale machine or Stewart platform is that it would enable an environment in which we could start thinking about systems level issues like integrating design software with the manufacturing devices, standards for connecting feedstocks or for tool changers, ways of coordinating work between machines. Many ideas could be carried down to the next scale.

If a dedicated micron-scale assembler will not be built in the short-term , I wonder if an existing MEMs device could be coaxed into doing something more productive. For example: could a readily-available Digital Mirror Device be used to move objects on its surface in interesting patterns with the right kind of video input?

High precision miniature piezo motors are becoming much cheaper and there could be a non-linear growth in homebrew micro assemblers.

By: Michael Kuntzman

Michael Kuntzman — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:44:22 +0000

I wouldn’t call myself an expert in the field, but it seems to me that we have the technology today to go all the way to atomic precision in just a few iterations. What we are lacking are the intermediate designs, and the funding and effort to develop and build them.

Consider MEMS technology. It’s been around for quite a while now. We have a lot of experience with it, and we’ve built some pretty amazing stuff with it. We even know how to combine MEMS with CMOS on the same chip. I wonder, how hard would it be to build a delta robot or steward platform a few hundred microns across (I suppose the delta robot would be harder)?

Today’s macroscale robots have micron-scale precision – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du2f-EUDqio
I quote the technical specs from the comments:
Max speed: 2m/s
Repeatability: 1um
Max load (keeping precision): 3kg
That robot looks maybe half a meter across? That’s about 1:500000 ratio. If a 500um delta robot had the same precision ratio, its precision would be 1nm! But even with a 1:1000 ratio, you’d still be only a few iterations away. How many of today’s transistors could one fit in a 500um x 500um square? Enough to build a simple ASIC controller, I would think.

If you ask me, that’s what we should be trying to build.