Collaborative Proposal: EMT/MISC Behavior Based Molecular Robotics

基于行为的机器人技术是围绕这样一个想法建立的，即机器人可以通过连接基本的传感器和执行器模块来构建，而不需要形成它们所操作的世界的任何内部表示。当设计得当，这样的机器人，无论是作为个人还是作为群体，表现出复杂的，似乎？聪明？行为，真实的实时解决具有挑战性的任务，同时仅对本地环境做出反应并遵守本地规则。在某种程度上，这种机器人方法的灵感来自于考虑自然系统，例如社会昆虫在其殖民地中的自我组织和适应性。一种类似的方法，以启动基于行为的分子机器人领域的发展将在未来三年内进行，导致分子组，将出现一个观察员，以显示各种面向任务的行为或某种形式的有目的的和动态的自组织。基于个体行为的分子机器人是具有多个传感器-致动器的单个分子。当暴露于显示与其传感器-致动器键合的基底的人造景观时，分子开始执行基本步骤，在随机意义上由其不断变化的局部环境确定。在某些被称为规范的景观中，个体分子机器人及其集体将执行模拟具有序列控制机制的自动机的算法。相比之下，在非确定性景观中，机器人及其集体将展示来自单个传感器和执行器的内部组织以及分子与环境之间的局部相互作用的特性。重要的是，这些对分子行为的新解释将允许与以前所有分子机器人方法完全不同的实验，同时保持实验设计的现实性，从而在物理世界中体现出来。

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.