Automatic planning of nanoparticle assembly tasks

This paper presents a practical planning system for 2-D assembly tasks at the nanoscale. The planner covers a whole range of problems in planning the assembly of nanoparticle patterns, including object assignment, obstacle detection and avoidance, path finding, and path sequencing. We describe algorithms based on optimization theory and visibility graph construction, and show how to integrate them into a comprehensive planner that has a low-order polynomial complexity and produces good results. We provide theoretical analysis and experimental results. This is a first step towards automating assembly tasks in nanorobotics.