Nano-wireless communication for microrobotics: bridging the gap

Among all the new robotics technologies, great interest is rising in the field of microrobotics. Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) microrobots are miniaturized electro-mechanical devices that can perform various tasks in a wide area of applications. Despite the low-power and low-memory capacity, they are provided with sensors and actuators. Self-reconfiguration is a key factor for MEMS microrobots to perform their tasks and to optimize their communications in order to achieve efficiency, parallelism and scalability. Nano-transceivers and nano-antennas operating in the Terahertz Band offer a promising communication paradigm, providing nanowireless networking directly integrated in MEMS microrobots. Catoms from Claytronics project are an appropriate microrobotics case to explore this novel framework. Several logical topology shape-shifting algorithms have been implemented and tested, along with different nano-wireless simulations. This paper aims to provide a survey on nano-wireless communication for modular robotics and propose some optimization choices. Special emphasis is given to the use of the nano-wireless communications for topology formation and maintenance in microrobotics.