Nano 2026

Biomedical nanorobots could support targeted drug delivery, biosensing and tissue engineering but limited coordination restricts operation in complex physiological environments. This study explores a modular autonomous swarm architecture where different nanorobot designs operate through the same cooperative mechanism. Each robot has a biocompatible surface with affinity receptors or stimulus responsive elements for sensing local biomarkers and an interchangeable therapeutic or diagnostic payload. Robots travel by propulsion or fluid transport while receptor binding provides local biochemical input. Detection activates the release of diffusible signaling molecules which form local concentration gradients and recruit nearby robots. Recruited robots resample the biochemical environment and signaling thresholds assign them to verification, relay or payload roles. Relay robots regenerate the signaling cue to propagate verified information through the swarm, while repeated receptor responses from independent robots contribute to a distributed consensus threshold before action is permitted. The architecture was tested in simulated healthy, inflamed, damaged and target tissue with overlapping biomarker signals, sensor noise, communication loss, relay failure and robot failure. The complete swarm achieved 79.94% successful target identification and task completion, 94.88% specificity, 88.81% site classification accuracy and 69.27% payload efficiency, while reducing active swarm utilization from 65.43% to 8.08% and communication overhead by 37.7% compared with consensus only swarms. Performance remained 69.21% to 80.21% under individual disturbances and fell to 51.36% under combined severe stress. These results support biochemical communication and adaptive specialization as a basis for autonomous biomedical nanorobot swarms.

Dilay Gedik is a Mechanical Engineering student at Mt. San Antonio College in the USA. Her research focuses on biomedical nanorobotics, targeted drug delivery and swarm systems, with previous work accepted at an international nanomedicine conference. She has also conducted research in brain-computer interfaces and quantum field theory and received multiple international science and mathematics awards.