From autonomic robots to nanotechnology

The machines are coming and it’s going to be good. We won’t have to drive ourselves when tired, schlep stuff around warehouses, be bored on tractors, choke in mines, freeze on Mars, or miss broken pipes in nuclear inspection. If we choose to, the coming years will see machines doing more for us and doing it better. In this talk I pull apart some of the competencies needed to build “intelligent” self-driving vehicles. I’ll explain what makes it hard, what makes it exciting and how they all come together in a glorious bit of robotics science. I’d like lots of questions too.

DNA is found throughout nature as a long, string-like molecule that stores biological information. However, synthetic DNA is increasingly being used as molecular building material, where short strands of DNA self-assemble to form nanoscale structures and devices in a field known as DNA nanotechnology. In this talk I'll cover how DNA strands can be made to stick together by altering its sequence. With this approach we can build 2D and 3D structures, and even devices that generate motion.