Nanosensors are slated to revolutionize several fields including medicine, harsh environment sensing, and chip fabrication. This is an important field that assimilates technologies and concepts from multiple domains such as physics, chemistry, and engineering. Nanosensors are small, weak,fragile, and lack the power to work independently due to limited power and communication range. However, by self-assembling into larger nano-structures or complex systems, they have the ability to exhibit sophisticated behavior.
The workshop will address several pointed issues, including:
-  The reason swarm simulation software (e.g., Swarm and RePast) has failed to provide significant insight into emergent behavior of such systems
-  The merits and demerits of existing hardware platforms for automated swarm inspection
-  Standards that are needed to move small-scale swarm inspection into mainstream use
-  The role of communication in swarm behavior
For more information click here

A wireless antenna that channels signals along human skin could broadcast signals over your body to connect up medical implants or portable gadgets.

The new power-efficient approach could make more of established medical devices like pacemakers or help future implants distributed around the body work together.

Just one of the small hockey-puck-like antennas developed at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, would be able to connect to gadgets anywhere else on the body, says William Scanlon who made the design with colleague Gareth Conway.

The new design’s ability to produce signals that creep along the skin makes it more efficient than existing battery-hungry technologies such as Bluetooth, says Scanlon – an important factor for medical devices which need long life-spans.

More info here.

In the world of underwater robots, this is a team of pioneers. While most ocean robots require periodic communication with scientist or satellite intermediaries to share information, these can work cooperatively communicating only with each other.
Over the past five years Kristi Morgansen, a UW assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics, has built three Robofish that communicate with one another underwater. Recently at the International Federation of Automatic Control’s Workshop on Navigation, Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles, she presented results showing that the robots had successfully completed their first major test. The robots were programmed to either all swim in one direction or all swim in different directions, basic tasks that can provide the building blocks for coordinated group movement. This success in indoor test tanks will eventually provide the basis for ocean-going systems to better explore remote ocean environments.

“Underwater robots don’t need oxygen. The only reason they come up to the surface right now is for communication,” Morgansen said.

Her robots would not need to come to the surface until their task was complete. They could cooperatively track moving targets underwater, such as groups of whales or spreading plumes of pollution, or explore caves, go underneath ice-covered waters, or into) dangerous environments where surfacing might not be possible. Schools of robots would be able to work together to do things that one could not do alone, such as tracking large herds of animals or mapping expanses of pollution that can grow and change shape.

More info here.