Autonomous Behaviour in Living and Robotic Matter 2020

This workshop has been rescheduled to 1 - 5 March 2021

Description and Aim
Emergent materials have properties and behaviours that result from the local and collective interactions between their building blocks, often vastly exceeding those of individual building blocks. Recently, there has been an upsurge of interest from a range of disciplines, including physics, chemistry, material science, engineering, robotics, and architecture, for both living and artificial materials featuring shape-morphing, adaptive, self-oscillating, and self-learning behaviour. All these striking properties stem from the out-of-equilibrium interactions and feedback between the building blocks, mediated via chemical signalling, nonlinear mechanical coupling or electronic communication. 

The aim of the workshop is to bring the different communities together and to identify the common open questions and physical principles related to feedback, characteristic length-scales and scalability underlying autonomous behaviour in the fields of soft, living and robotic matter.

What do we want to achieve?
We believe that a workshop that brings together experts from designer, living and robotic matter will result in a cross-fertilization between these fields. The rich behaviour observed in living matter can inspire advances in designer and robotic matter, and vice-versa designer and robotic matter could function as testing platform to identify the key ingredients for autonomous emergent behaviour in living matter. We envision that stronger interactions between these fields will significantly boost our ability to explore new topics of autonomous emergent behaviour, such as self-folding, self-oscillations, self-organization, adaptation and learning. 

Therefore, by bringing together experts in living and artificial materials we can actively steer to make connections and cover new ground and identify general physical mechanism for autonomous emergent behaviour.