Basic nanomachines are already in use. Nanobots will be the next generation of nanomachines. Advanced nanobots will be able to sense and adapt to environmental stimuli such as heat, light, sounds, surface textures, and chemicals; perform complex calculations; move, communicate, and work together; conduct molecular assembly; and, to some extent, repair or even replicate themselves. Nanobot.info is an informational site that provides information on both recent developments and future applications at the intersection of nanotechnology and robotics. Nanotechnology is the science and application of creating objects on a level smaller than 100 nanometers. The extreme concept of nanotechnology is the "bottom up" creation of virtually any material or object by assembling one atom at a time. Although nanotech processes occur at the scale of nanometers, the materials and objects that result from these processes can be much larger. Large-scale results happen when nanotechnology involves massive parallelism in which many simultaneous and synergistic nanoscale processes combine to produce a large-scale result.
Nanotechnology spans and merges disciplines dealing with matter at the micro level (physics, chemistry, and biology) with those dealing with matter at the macro level (engineering, materials science and computer science).