Evolution, once the preserve of biology, has been widely emulated in software, while
physically embodied systems that can evolve have been limited to electronic and robotic
devices and have never been artificially implemented in populations of physically interacting
chemical entities. Herein we present a liquid-handling robot built with the aim of
investigating the properties of oil droplets as a function of composition via an automated
evolutionary process. The robot makes the droplets by mixing four different compounds in …