ALBANY — American soldiers in the future may wear fatigues loaded with nano-sensor equipment, be kept alive by smart bandages that deliver medications tailored to their individual biologies and deploy microrobots programmed to sneak into the tiniest cracks in an enemy’s defense — thanks to a new partnership between the UAlbany NanoCollege and the Army Research Laboratory.

NanoCollege and ARL officials signed a memorandum of understanding Tuesday that created a legal structure for the two organizations to share research data.

Alain Kaloyeros, vice president and chief administrative officer of the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering of the University at Albany, said college officials, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Army officials have been in negotiations for the last nine months to create the partnership. He said growth at the NanoCollege enabled Tuesday’s signing ceremony.

“We needed to have the critical mass of capabilities on site in terms of some of the intellectual assets, the faculty and the resources to be able to partner with the Army for defense applications,” Kaloyeros said.

The collaboration will be called the Center for National Nanotechnology Innovation & Commercialization and headquartered inside the new 250,000-square-foot NanoFab 300 East building, NanoCollege officials said.

John Pellegrino, director of the ARL Sensors and Electron Devices Directorate, said the Army hopes to use its new relationship with the university as a bridge to the many companies and organizations that already have research agreements with the college, such as International Sematech. He said over the next few weeks, ARL and the NanoCollege will define projects and goals for the collaboration.

“[The ARL] has a very large number of highly talented researchers who understand the Army and its needs and applications. When you couple that with [the NanoCollege’s professors and expertise] and the kinds of industrial partners one also sees here at Albany — that forms a very strong group,” Pellegrino said. “If you work just with an individual company, it can indeed form some powerful applications, but not when you’re getting into these very new domains that offer so much more.”

According to officials the partnership will use the existing budgets of both organizations and will not include, at least at first, any additional federal funding.

Kaloyeros said he hopes the collaboration will eventually grow to be as big as the Army’s partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He said the Army’s research at MIT benefits from about $20 million in annual federal funding.

“What MIT has done on the materials and longer-term chemical aspects of nanotechnology we’re doing here with the devices [called] sensor-on-a-chip. Our hope is within the next few years we’ll have a center of equal or bigger size that compliments what’s going on at MIT,” he said.

Nanotechnology is manipulation of matter on the nanoscale. For perspective, one human hair is about 80,000 nanometers thick

Kaloyeros said the new partnership offers the Army an opportunity to build a major competitive edge in its use of nanotechnology-enhanced equipment.

“The whole idea is to have a soldier with army fatigues embedded with sensors that track the vital signs and basically follow what the soldier is seeing in the field and get real-time information of where the enemy is. It’s a real-time way to prepare the fighting force of the 21st century,” he said.

“In all candor, I believe the reason a lot of foreign companies are now doing their research in the U.S. is because what we’re doing, and the U.S. is doing, is 10 to 15 years ahead of any other country. That’s why quite a few of the partnerships, even in this new center, could involve quite a few European companies.”

Pellegrino said he becomes very excited talking about the possible military applications of nanotechnology, which could also benefit the civilian world.

“One can look at the medical perspective and think eventually of bandages that are printable, programmable and can sense things on the individual and dispense tailored [medications]. This technology is what will help us get to that kind of vision,” he said.

ARL researchers also envision Army robots made smarter and more agile than the current generation of drones used in Iraq.

“We would put nanotechnology integrated onto the skins of microrobots that would be able to do such things as go in and search buildings, autonomously, for any bad guys hiding behind walls ready to take out our soldiers or — in a natural disaster situation — [be able to] find people who are alive in the rubble,” Pellegrino said. “Some of the issues with sending past robots into rubble has been getting [information back] out. [With nano-enhanced microrobots] you could send signals through a chain of microrobots to, in effect, wirelessly get [information] out.”

The memorandum of understanding was signed during the second annual Convergence of International Research and Commercialization in Albany, known as CIRCA ’08.