The micro-robot has pincers that can be opened by heating them with a laser. When the laser is turned off, the pincers cool and close.
…
“Since there is no wiring, and the robot freely floats in air, it can operate in an enclosed chamber while the whole setup is outside,” Khamesee said. “It can work in hazardous environments, toxic chambers, and it can be used to conduct bio-hazardous experiments. Also, since there is no mechanical linkage, it has a dust-free operation, suitable for clean room applications.”
This is starting to approach some of the microbot widgetry described in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
Japan, with a high life expectancy and low birth rate, faces a shortage of caregivers for elderly people and has loosened its tight immigration rules to invite hundreds of nurses from the Philippines and Indonesia.
“As aging of the population is a common problem for developed countries, Japan wants to become an advanced country in the area of addressing the aging society with the use of robots,” the official told AFP.
It also occurs to me that I’m due to shuffle into codgerhood around circa 2060. I wonder what fifty years of R&D on ApriAttenda, or this, could lead to…
Modelled on carp and costing about £20,000 ($29,000) each to make, the fish are to be lifelike in appearance and swimming behaviour so they will not alarm their fellow marine inhabitants.
The robots, the first of their kind, are equipped with tiny chemical sensors capable of detecting pollutants in the water. These let the fish home in on the sources of hazardous pollutants, such as leaks from vessels or undersea pipelines.
…
“Using shoals of robotic fish for pollution detection in harbours might appear like something straight out of science fiction [but] there are very practical reasons for choosing this form,” said Rory Doyle, senior research scientist at BMT Group. “In using robotic fish we are building on a design created by hundreds of millions of years’ worth of evolution which is incredibly energy efficient.
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Each robotic fish is about 1.5 metres long and can swim at a maximum speed of about one metre per second. Whenever they find traces of pollutants, the fish can relay the information to the shore.
The EA randomly creates large numbers of control “genomes” for the robot. These behaviour patterns are tested in training sessions, and the most successful genomes are “bred” together to create still better versions – until the best control system is arrived at.
MacLeod’s team took this idea a step further, however, and developed an incremental evolutionary algorithm (IEA) capable of adding new parts to its robot brain over time.
Further reading: an excellent non-fiction book that explores the idea of evolution as a general method of design is The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker.
A snake-like robot is being developed to aid medics in the rapid diagnosis and treatment of injured soldiers, from Technology Review:
Choset and his students have engineered a highly articulated robotic arm that consists of multiple actuated joints, which give the robot a snakelike flexibility. Each joint has two degrees of freedom that, working together, allow the robot to flex, retract, and twist into different configurations, much like a live snake.
As ever snakebots+military immediately put me in mind of Alastair Reynold’s excellent Century Rain.
Further developments in the field of microtechnology with the development by the University of Waterloo of a magnetically-levitating microbot with laser-controlled manipulators:
News that Japanese company Toshiba are developing a houskeeping robot – 
I saw 
Researchers at the University of Aberdeen have 
A snake-like robot is being developed to aid medics in the rapid diagnosis and treatment of injured soldiers,