The Tiny Robots Will See You Now

Over the past week, we've highlighted a lot of big, impressive robots. Now it's time to pay homage to their teeny, tiny counterparts. These tiny robots will someday "have a major impact" on disease diagnosis, treatment, and prevention, according to a new review in Nature Robotics from a top nanoengineering team at the University of California, San Diego. The review highlights four areas of medicine where tiny robots have been successfully used in proof-of-concept studies: targeted delivery, precision surgery, sensing of biological targets, and detoxification. Of those, "active drug delivery is primarily the most promising commercial application of medical microrobots," said paper co-author Joseph Wang, chair of nanoengineering at UCSD, in an email to IEEE Spectrum.