Morphological control: Applications on different scales exploiting classical and statistical mechanics

Abstract

We present three case studies in which we discuss conceptual and technical aspects of the application of morpholoigcal computation in medical and/or chemical contexts. Up to now, most implementations of morphological computing take profit of classical mechanics and so does one of ours (an inflatable support system for patients with movement impairments). The two other case studies deal with processes and devices on the micrometer scale (self-assembled chemical micro-reactors and models of induced repair in radio-oncology). We use these examples to introduce the notion of embodied process control and discuss how the role taken by classical mechanics in systems on the macro-scale can be adopted by statistical mechanics in case of implementations on the micrometer scale.