Zusammenfassung
Abstract Morphological computation can be loosely
defined as the exploitation of the shape, material
properties, and physical dynamics of a physical system
to improve the efficiency of a computation.
Morphological control is the application of
morphological computing to a control task. In its
theoretical part, this article sharpens and extends
these definitions by suggesting new formalized
definitions and identifying areas in which the
definitions we propose are still inadequate. We go on
to describe three ongoing studies, in which we are
applying morphological control to problems in medicine
and in chemistry. The first involves an inflatable
support system for patients with impaired movement, and
is based on macroscopic physics and concepts already
tested in robotics. The two other case studies
(self-assembly of chemical microreactors; models of
induced cell repair in radio-oncology) describe
processes and devices on the micrometer scale, in which
the emergent dynamics of the underlying physical system
(e.g., phase transitions) are dominated by stochastic
processes such as diffusion.
Nutzer