ABSTRACT
It is relatively well known that the word “robot” originates from
Karel Cˇapek’s 1921 drama Rossum’s Universal Robots (RUR). Perhaps less known is the fact that the robots envisaged by Cˇapek were not
based on electromechanical devices, but their constituent material
was “. . . some kind of colloidal jelly that not even a dog would eat”
(RUR, prologue). Using today’s terminology, they were based on soft
matter. Living organisms found in nature are also based on soft
matter, and their fundamental building block is the cell. Using cell-
like entities rather than bulkmaterials as the basic building blocks of
functional devices offers several advantages such as the potential for
adaptive change of size and shape, robustness against local damage,
and the possibility to switch between the aggregated (multicellular)
and distributed (swarm of single-cellular) forms of existence.
