Light Robotics – a brand new interdisciplinary R&D area

Scientific disciplines constantly evolve and create new offspring or subdisciplines that combine the favorable characteristics from its forerunners. The merger of biology and photonics has within the last decade produced one such off-spring, Biophotonics, which harnesses light to study biological materials. More recently we have seen the exciting merger of biophotonics with contemporary nanophotonics into so­-called NanoBiophotonics culminating with the recent Chemistry Nobel Prize for super-­resolution microscopy. After years of working on light-driven trapping and manipulation, we can see that a confluence of developments is now ripe for the emergence of a new area that can contribute to nanobiophotonics – Light Robotics– which combines advances in microfabrication and optical micromanipulation together with intelligent control ideas from robotics, wavefront engineering and Fourier optics. In the Summer 2017 we published a 482 pages edited Elsevier book volume covering the fundamental aspects needed for Light Robotics inclduing optical trapping systems, microfabrication and microassembly as well as underlying theoretical principles and experimental illustrations for optimizing optical forces and torques for Light Robotics. The Elsevier volume is presenting various new functionalities that are enabled by these new designed light-driven micro-robots in addition to various nano-biophotonics applications demonstrating the unique use of biophysical tools based on light robotic concepts. We have endeavored to make this new discipline accessible to a broad audience from advanced undergraduates and graduate students to practioners and researchers not only in nanobiophotonics and micro- and nanotechnology but also to other areas in optics, mechanical engineering, control and instrumentation engineering and related fields.