Design of micro- and nano-robots

Nanotechnology is a key issue in today's and tomorrow's development of advanced products. Soon, new tools will be needed to automatically handle and assemble micro sized objects with nanometer resolution, or simply to give humans being the capability of operating in those tiny dimensions. The development of micro and nano robots appears in that sense as one of the most promising issues in the near future. The paper describes two new robot designs, where the focus has been put firstly in high accuracy and secondly to the reduction of the overall dimensions. The first robot uses piezo actuators to achieve very precise displacements and the second one is a fully autonomous miniature mobile robot based on watch type gears.