About the Self-Organizing Systems Lab
The Self-Organizing Systems Lab is a joint venture between the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and the Department of Biology at TU Darmstadt. We perform theoretical analysis and wet-lab work.
Mission statement
We want to create programmable matter: Large-scale ensembles of reconfigurable agents that can collectively solve complex tasks such as self-assembly into specific shapes, distributed sensing, computing and control.
The SOS lab performs research on self-organization principles and addresses the question of how those principles can be put to use in artificial, engineering systems. We look at different domains with our main focus being molecular biology, in particular synthetic biology.
We are interested in the collective dynamics of large ensembles of agents, such as molecules, cells, colloids, or robots. Our vision is to develop programmable matter, where programmable units are replacing elementary atoms with their fixed physical interactions. As engineers we are particularly interested to go from a desired global emergent property to the required local interactions among the units. In order to reverse engineer self-organizing natural systems, we develop domain specific machine learning algorithms.
SOS lab is part of the Centre for Synthetic Biology at TU Darmstadt. The lab also participates in several collaborative research centers at TU Darmstadt and is an interdisciplinary research group.