One of the more impressive talks at last year's NBIC conference was Dr. Carlo Montemagno's presentation on an actin-based nanorobotic system developed by the UCLA biomotor group.

Having tried to design nanosystems for almost a decade, he recently turned to biomimetic principles (mimicking nature) with promising results. These principles include: local communication, no central processing, fully distributed, and stupid agents that follow simple rules. See the videos of the UCLA Biomotor group.