Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems

Molecular robotics is an emerging area of research aiming at building robots made of components such as sensors, computers, and actuators, which are all implemented as molecular devices. The molecular robot is supposed to react autonomously to its environment by receiving chemical/physical signals and decides behavior by molecular computation [1–3]. Firstly, I would like to introduce some basic principles of molecular computation based on hybridization reactions of DNA molecules. Various computational methods ranging from signal amplification, logic operation to reaction-diffusion-like computation have been proposed so far, will be implemented as computational components for the molecular robots. Despite extensive efforts, however, systems having all three functions (sensing, computation, and actuation) are still difficult to realize, because integrating different chemical components in the same spatio-temporal space causes a lot of undesired spurious interactions among them. How to integrate chemical devices into a consistent network is the central issue of molecular robotics indeed. I think new architectures are necessary to cope with this intrinsic difficulty. Proposed models of computation for molecular robots such as single-molecular computing, computing in liposomes and computing in gel will be introduced to show the current level of research in this field.