What countermeasures can robots develop against nanites?

Question

In sci fi TV tropes nanites or nanoscopic are autonomous molecules that can shut down robots by injecting them into their positronic brains, where they house all the important functions that dictates the behavior for each robot.

Often the nanites are stored in fluid form and guarded with powerful lasers to prevent misuse.

I am not sure why a computer virus can't do the termination part that they require nanites for the job but then could the robot come up with ingenious way to defeat the nanites that is wrecking havoc inside their chassis?

It seems to me that the nanites are not causing any physical harm like acid does. So. my question is: Can robots develop a countermeasures for nanites?

Answer 1

Vaccination presupposes working immune system, so let's assume the robot has built-in response mechanism - either his/her/its/their own nanities or some other mechanism, using advanced machine learning(tm) to recognize their adverse activities.

And the invading nanities are not recognized before they do their damage - so the vaccination is nothing more than downloading the correct description and responses. In fact, humanware mRNA is eerily similar.

Answer 2

They can change their "head" design so there's no opening for the nanites to be injected in, as you mentioned the nanites don't cause phasical damage so if they can't get into the positronic brain they can't shut it down, someone may still hold the robot down (using a bigger robot?) and saw an opening to the positronic brain but in that case it would likely be easier for him to just use the same saw to cut the positronic brains in half, I assume that would result in the same end result as the nanites with less steps required.

Answer 3

I think much will depend on how you set up your robots and your "disease" but anyway here is my attempt. Ranging from the obvious to more...science fiction ideas.

• Immediate destruction. The robots simply target anything entering the body and destroy. Big or small. Similar to an immune system. They are robots. They probably only need electricity.
• Fake brain. Assuming your attackers have a way to detect the brain and target it. The new generation, or new update, of robots comes with a fake brain. It could be a secondary brain or just something to simulate the functions of a brain. Then once that nanites attack they go for that brain. Kinda like those anti heat guided missiles measures that we see in video game and movies.
• No psychical access. Pretty simple. Either to the whole body or to the brain in particular. The "gates" are tightly closed and nothing passes.
• Snoopers. The robot body got a scouting corps that is top notch. It roams the body looking for potential trouble makers and take them out.
• Unique signals or encryption. To be used with any point or idea. The body generates a unique signal in it's "organs" so that anything foreign does not have that signal and thus can be used.
• Backup. Pretty simple. Your robot brain works like how we actually have backups of entire sites or databases or even windows restore points. So. Assuming the damage does not involve the thing being fried. So. Whatever damage is taken your thing just rolls back the latest working point.
• No brain. Maybe a bit out of the limitations of the question. Anyway. Your robot is not a unified central creatures with "CPU" controlling everything. Nope. Your robot is composed of thousands of tiny little processes and fragments of processes and different parts that it's only a unity in the final result. Thing about how marching battalion is composed of individual people all marching with such coherence that they appear as a single organism. While withing this battalion there are roles and losing the sniper or heavy gunner or whatever will hurt. You battalion is still there. So. In each part of your robot there is a process that functions both as an independent creatures but also as a part of a whole. Now this means that nanites can't even identify a target. And that even if a part or small process is taken out, the whole creatures survives. And with time might heal.
• Morphing robots. Last the most bizarre. You robots are made up of constantly morphing..."things" The code is changing, the internal structure is changing, the position of certain parts is changing. It's like it's constantly killing and remaking itself in a new image. This means that unless you can figure out on which axis, if any, the changes are been made. Then you can't target it. Thing of how you just figured out a backdoor into a particular windows version using a particular exploit. By the time you test it, the OS has already changed itself that it's more of a linux distro, and by the time you start to find a weakness in the new thing, it already morphed into another form of OS that is perhaps completely alien to you.

Answer 4

Use the method that was part of the backstory of the TV series Andromeda. The reason they gave for why nanotech wasn't used extensively in a biowarfare role, given the widespread use of the technology, was that people had defensive nanotech that acted as an adjunct to their natural immune systems. They were already using it for medical purposes, so having it also act as a defense against hostile nanotech was a no-brainer.

So your robots simply have their own nanotech to act as an immune system.