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Dec 8, 2022

The smallest robotic arm you can imagine is controlled by artificial intelligence

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics, robotics/AI

Researchers used deep reinforcement learning to steer atoms into a lattice shape, with a view to building new materials or nanodevices.

In a very cold vacuum chamber, single atoms of silver form a star-like . The precise formation is not accidental, and it wasn’t constructed directly by either. Researchers used a kind of artificial intelligence called learning to steer the atoms, each a fraction of a nanometer in size, into the lattice shape. The process is similar to moving marbles around a Chinese checkers board, but with very tiny tweezers grabbing and dragging each atom into place.

The main application for deep is in robotics, says postdoctoral researcher I-Ju Chen. “We’re also building robotic arms with deep learning, but for moving atoms,” she explains. “Reinforcement learning is successful in things like playing chess or video games, but we’ve applied it to solve at the nanoscale.”

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