Programmable matter
Programmable matter is a term originally coined in 1991 by Toffoli and Margolus to refer to an ensemble of fine-grained computing elements arranged in space.
In 2002, Seth Goldstein and Todd Mowry started the claytronics project at Carnegie Mellon University to investigate the underlying hardware and software mechanisms necessary to realize programmable matter.
[5][6] From 2016 to 2022, the ANR has funded several research programs coordinated by Julien Bourgeois and Benoit Piranda at the FEMTO-ST Institute, which is taking the lead in the Claytronics project initiated by Intel and Carnegie Mellon University.
[7] In one school of thought, the programming could be external to the material and might be achieved by the "application of light, voltage, electric or magnetic fields, etc."
At one end of the spectrum, reconfigurable modular robotics pursues a form of programmable matter where the individual units are in the centimeter size range.
[4][8][9] At the nanoscale end of the spectrum, there are a tremendous number of different bases for programmable matter, ranging from shape changing molecules[10] to quantum dots.
In the micrometer to sub-millimeter range examples include MEMS-based units, cells created using synthetic biology, and the utility fog concept.
An important sub-group of programmable matter are robotic materials, which combine the structural aspects of a composite with the affordances offered by tight integration of sensors, actuators, computation, and communication,[11] while foregoing reconfiguration by particle motion.
A further example of programmable -mechanical- metamaterial is presented by Bergamini et al.[13] Here, a pass band within the phononic bandgap is introduced, by exploiting variable stiffness of piezoelectric elements linking aluminum stubs to the aluminum plate to create a phononic crystal as in the work of Wu et al.[14] The piezoelectric elements are shunted to ground over synthetic inductors.
[13] In 2021, Chen et al. demonstrated a mechanical metamaterial whose unit cells can each store a binary digit analogous to a bit inside a hard disk drive.
[15] Similarly, these mechanical unit cells are programmed through the interaction between two electromagnetic coils in the Maxwell configuration, and an embedded magnetorheological elastomer.
The ability to self-repair by automatically replacing a broken module will make SRCMR solution incredibly resilient.
[18] Claytronics is an emerging field of engineering concerning reconfigurable nanoscale robots ('claytronic atoms', or catoms) designed to form much larger scale machines or mechanisms.
"[citation needed] Such cells are usually used to create larger systems (e.g., biofilms) which can be "programmed" utilizing synthetic gene networks such as genetic toggle switches, to change their color, shape, etc.
