© 1999 Robert A. Freitas Jr. All Rights Reserved.

Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities, Landes Bioscience, Georgetown, TX, 1999

8.3.6 Dedicated Navigational Organs

By direct analogy to communication organs (Section 7.3.4), dedicated macroscopic organs may be implanted in the human body to facilitate navigation. One important function of such organs would be to act as central clearinghouses for systemic information that is normally available only regionally or to individual navicytes. This information might include updated positions of all regional monuments, orientations of various grid sectors relative to gravity, or information on macroscopic rotation rates (e.g., compasses, gyros) to allow centrifugal and gravitational forces to be distinguished. Highly accurate chronometers could also be maintained in these organs (Section 10.1.4) to allow periodic systemwide resynchronization.

Dedicated navigation organs could serve as the "map rooms" of the body, collating and organizing new information as it comes in, maintaining accurate navicyte grid maps, organ maps, vascular maps, functional maps (Section 8.4), and so forth, possibly in coordination with dedicated computational organs (Section 10.2.5). A 1 mm³ navigational library node can contain up to ~10 million terabits of map data, which may be downloaded to nanorobots berthed at docking ports at rates of up to 0.01 terabit/sec drawing ~50 pW per docking port during the transfer (Section 7.2.6).

Dedicated navigation organs may be employed as direct interfaces between internal navigational systems and related macroscopic external modalities including operating theaters, clinical equipment, various environmental entities, satellite uplinks, radio antennae, transportation vehicles, and the like. They could also serve as emitter organs in GPS-like acoustic navigational systems (Section 8.3.5).

Last updated on 19 February 2003