Micro-robotics issues

W.S.N. Trimmer's quote in the introduction, taken from , shows that manipulating, assembling and even manufacturing objects in these dimensions often means using the laws of physics in a different way to how we use them on a macroscopic scale. In particular, the effects of scale mean that certain phenomena that are negligible on our scale are often no longer so in smaller dimensions. A typical example of the effects of this change in scale is the predominant influence of adhesion forces in micromanipulation. Conversely, other forces, such as gravity, often become negligible in the "microworld"...