Collaborative Research: EMT/MISC: Behavior-Based Molecular Robotics

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Behavior-based robotics was established around the idea that robots could be constructed by connecting elementary sensor and actuator modules, without the need to form any internal representation of the world in which they operate. When designed appropriately, such robots, both as individuals and as groups, exhibit complex and seemingly ?intelligent? behaviors, solving challenging tasks in real time, while reacting only to their local environment and obeying sets of local rules. In part, this approach to robotics was inspired by considering natural systems, such as self-organization and adaptability of social insects in their colonies. An analogous approach to initiate the development of the field of behavior-based molecular robotics will be performed over the next three years, leading to groups of molecules that would appear to an observer to show a variety of task-oriented behaviors or some form of purposeful and dynamic self-organization. Individual behavior-based molecular robots are single molecules displaying multiple sensors-actuators. When exposed to artificial landscapes displaying substrates keyed to their sensors-actuators, the molecules start executing elementary steps, determined, in a stochastic sense, by their constantly changing local environments. On some landscapes, called prescriptive, individual molecular robots and their collectives will execute algorithms mimicking wound-up automata with sequence control mechanisms. In contrast, on non-deterministic landscapes, the robots and their collectives will demonstrate properties emerging from internal organization of individual sensors and actuators and through local interactions between molecules and their environments. Importantly, these new interpretations of molecular behaviors will allow radically different experiments from all previous approaches to molecular robotics, while keeping experimental designs realistic, leading to embodiment in the physical world.