March 2017 Issue
Topics
Innovative molecular robotics: Chemical reaction circuits for intelligent molecular robots
Satoshi Kobayashi Professor, Department of Communications Engineering and Informatics, Graduate School of Informatics and Engineering
Satoshi Kobayashi is one of the key members of the interdisciplinary project, "Development of Molecular Robots Equipped with Sensors and Intelligence", funded supported by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). "Our goal is to develop functional molecular robots," says Kobayashi. "These robots are autonomous and react to their surroundings via functional molecular devices such sensors, actuators, and computers. My role in the project is to design molecular computer, that is logic circuits, for constructing intelligent molecular robots."
Figure 1 shows the main features of the molecular computer being developed by Kobayashi and his colleagues at UEC. Notably, DNA molecules carry out most the information processing and the main problem to resolve is how to transform DNA molecules to the other molecules and vice versa.
Notably, Kobayashi has proposed implementing molecular robots using analog computing devices, amplifier, adder, multiplier, and divider that are time-responsive (Fig.2). "These devices can be implemented by using simple reversible strand displacement reactions such as seesaw gates," says Kobayashi. "Under these conditions, the computation is defined as being in steady state."
"Molecular robots are expected to find a wide range of applications, including in medicine," says Kobayashi. "In the future, we will need expertise in control theory and much faster molecular computing devices. The ultimate challenge is developing ways of constructing an actual system composed of all the individual parts. We still need many new ideas! "
References
- Engineering multistate DNA molecules: a tunable thermal band-pass filter, John A. Rose, Ken Komiya, Satoshi Kobayashi, Micro & Nano Letters, 11, 595, (2016).
- Molecular computers for molecular robots as hybrid systems, Masami Hagiya, Nathanael Aubert-Kato, Shaoyu Wang, and Satoshi Kobayashi, Theoretical Computer Science, 632,4, (2016).
- Molecular Robots with Sensors and Intelligence, Masami Hagiya, Akihiko Konagaya, Satoshi Kobayashi, Hirohide Saito, and Satoshi Murata, Acc. Chem. Res. 47, 1681, (2014).
