Descriptions and challenges of AFM based nanorobotic systems

Nanorobotics means literally the study of robots that are nanoscale in typical size, i.e. nanorobots,which have yet to be realized. Generally, nanorobots are large robots capable of manipulation nanoscale objects with nanometer resolution, e.g. a AFMbased nanorobotic manipulation system and a scanning electron microscope (SEM) equipped with a nanomanipulator.When studying nanorobotics, we first have to understand physics that underlies interactions at the nanoscale. At microscale, some basic micromanipulation problems attributed to the scale affects have been identified. We have seen how the surface effects, instead of volume effects, dominate the physical phenomena at this scale. Most of these scaling laws are still available at the nanoscale. However, the scale affects become more severe at the nanoscale due to the additional three orders of magnitude in size reduction, and it becomes much more difficult to predict and control because of more scale effects and uncertainties introduced when the nanomanipulation performed in the nanoworld.