MICREAgents is a collaborative project in Unconventional Computing (UComp) funded by Future Emerging Technologies in the EU FP7 program (start 1/9/2012).
The central idea of the project is to create a programmable microscale electronic chemistry, that employs circuit elements (including super capacitors and energy harvesting) on autonomous self-assembling microscale particles (target ≤ 100 µm maximal dimension) in solution, which we call lablets, to direct reversible association (binding) between them and control access to and chemical reactions in the resulting enclosed reaction compartments.
This will provide a novel form of computation that microscopically links reaction processing with computation in autonomous mobile smart reactors. This is a next major step towards the integration of computation and reactive chemical processing in electronically programmable systems: it corresponds to a radical integration of autonomous chemical experimentation and represents a novel form of computation.