There is increasing interest in using technological interfaces to explore and expand the capabilities of artificial life research. We are beginning to see systems that exploit the integration of wetware, software and hardware. Here we focus on the overall architecture for real-time model-based control of thermocapillary motion of droplets in a liquid layer with a low power laser beam on a modular robotic platform. We developed a control-oriented class of models using a closed-loop system architecture, that is characterized by state estimation, parameter identification and control. This results in a fast and potentially robust system for the manipulation of far from equilibrium droplet systems in real time.

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© 2017 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2017
MIT Press
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.