Robot pick and place

Self-assembly is a massively parallel process, and can normally involve very large numbers of components (a large crystallization might involve 1027molecules). Robotic pick-and-place methods for placement are limited by the fact that they are serial. Although they can be accelerated by using a number of robotic devices in parallel (for example, the multiple scanning probe heads of the IBM millipede 131), they cannot approach the number of molecules in a test tube, for example. 

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