A Landauer Limit for Robotic Manipulation

A major role of robots is to assist in assembly by moving building blocks and by exerting forces, e.g. to snap parts together. At the molecular scale, diffusive transport and thermal forces permit self-assembly, and molecular robots can only accelerate the process by performing work. This raises the question if - similar to Landauer's principle in computing - there is a lower limit to the work done by a robot for a given acceleration of an assembly process. Here, a brief analysis suggests that a doubling of a reaction rate by robotic manipulation requires at least kBTln2 in energy expenditure, either to perform mechanical work or to erase information.