Molecular robotics presents the challenge of productively harnessing massively distributed systems with agents numbering up to Avogadro's number, operating under a regime where thermal fluctuations and diffusion provide both constraints and natural efficiencies. We anticipate its emergence over the next few decades as a general enabling technology with applications spanning from research tools, diagnostics, and therapeutics to near atomically precise fabrication, scalable environmental sensing, and molecular information storage, retrieval, and processing.

 

Our laboratories focus on DNA as a model system, as it represents the most amenable material available today for exploring and establishing the foundations of this rising discipline.