Self-driving vehicles at the microscale

said braka 3:16 AM
The scientists, led by Longqiu Li at the Harbin Institute of

Technology in China, and Joseph Wang at the University of California San Diego in the US, have published a paper on the smart microvehicles in a recent issue of ACS Nano.
"We have embedded  into a micro/nanorobot," Li told Phys.org. "We introduce a smart microvehicle for precise autonomous navigation in complicated and dynamically changing environments through optimal path planning. Similar to their large vehicle counterparts, the autonomous navigation of microvehicles entails collision-free movement in dynamic environments."
Until now, micro- and nanomachines have been restricted to navigation that uses a closed-loop control system, in which the machines can only move along a predefined path. The new study marks the first demonstration of micromachines that can autonomously navigate complex, dynamically changing environments, such as those with other moving micromachines.
The  process consists of three main steps. A CCD camera attached to a microscope takes pictures and sends them to a feature extraction processor, which identifies obstacles and constructs a map of the environment. The map is then sent as input to an Artificial Intelligence (AI) planner, which uses a path-searching algorithm and fuzzy logic approach to determine the shortest collision-free path among multiple possible paths to the destination. The AI planner then sends these travel directions to a magnetic field generator, which orients a magnetic field in such a way as to steer the microvehicle along the collision-free pathway.


Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-08-self-driving-vehicles-microscale.html#jCp