The Embryonics Project: a machine made of artificial cells

It is possible to trace the origins of biological inspiration in the design of electronic circuits to the very dawn of the field of computer engineering, with the work of John von Neumann in the 1940s. To his brilliance we owe not only the first methodical attempts to define the electronic equivalents of many fundamental biological process, but also the development of the first self-replicating computing machines. Unfortunately, the electronic technology of the time would not allow a physical realization of von Neumann's machines, and it was not until the introduction of new programmable circuits in the 1980s that the field of bio-inspired machines gained new momentum. In this article, we describe the Embryonics (embryonic electronics) Project, an attempt to draw inspiration from the ontogenetic processes that determine the growth of multicellular organisms in the design of new, massively parallel arrays of processors (the artificial cells). Our cells are simple processors, all based on an identical hardware structure and all containing the same program (our artificial genome), but executing different parts of the genome depending on their spatial coordinates within the array. As in living beings, the presence of the genome in every cell allows the introduction of features such as self-replication and self-repair (cicatrization). In addition, the cells are implemented using an array of programmable elements (the artificial molecules), which allows their structure to be adapted to a given application. Through the parallel operation of many of these simple processors, we hope to realize highly complex systems, the equivalent of multicellular organisms in the natural world.