What are Cognitive Nanorobots?

Cognitive nanorobots are an extension of the more familiar idea of medical nanorobots.

Medical nanorobots are a range of medical solutions using nanoscale electronics. Medical nanorobots span the continuum from nanoparticles in current pharmaceutical use that disgorge cargo in cellular destinations per simple onboard logic instructions to optically-stimulated channelrhodopsin proteins for real-time live biological intervention to the more elaborate conceptualization of many species of future medical nanorobots such as respirocytes, clottocytes, vasculoids, and microbivores that could perform a variety of biophysical clean-up, maintenance, and augmentation functions in the body.

In the most basic sense, cognitive nanorobots are the analog to medical nanorobots, nanorobots deployed in the specific context of facilitating, aiding, and improving the processes of cognition like perception and memory, a sort of NanoNeuroProsthetics.

Cognition is just another biological function, a process that can possibly be identified, managed, and ameliorated. Robert Freitas in the Nanomedicine text books has already begun to explore the issue of nanorobot biocompatibility with neural cells, and outlined the different levels of concern and response for them: mechanical, physiological, immunological, cytological, and biochemical.

In summary, one initial way to consider and classify cognitive nanorobots is as a special case of medical nanorobots.

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