On the scalability of agent-based modeling for medical nanorobotics

Abstract

Nanorobotics is an emerging field of research in robotics technology, which may someday benefit clinical medicine by delivering both drugs and diagnostics into the human body. Potential applications of medical nanorobotics include early diagnosis of cancer, neutralisation of viruses, precise and incisionless surgery, targeted drug delivery, and monitoring and treatment of diabetes. To further study the application of nanorobotics in medicine, this paper focuses on the design of an agent-based simulation system, which is a computer simulation composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents within an environment. Agent-based modeling has been used to solve problems that are difficult for an individual agent to solve. A swarm of simulated robots that has individual skills and partial information about a medical problem can work collaboratively to develop a solution to it. We particularly want to investigate the scalability requirements of data distribution and communication techniques under different constraints at the nano scale.