Morphogenetic self-organisation of swarm robots for adaptive pattern formation

Self-organisation is one of the most important features observed in social, economic, ecological and biological systems. Distributed self-organizing systems are able to generate emergent global behaviors through local interactions among individuals without a centralised control. Such systems are also supposed to be robust, self-repairable and highly adaptive. However, design of self-organising systems is very challenging, particularly when the emerged global behaviors are required to be predictable. Morphogenesis is the biological process in which a fertilised cell proliferates, producing a large number of cells that interact with each other to generate the body plan of an organism. Biological morphogenesis, governed by gene regulatory networks through cellular and molecular interactions, can be seen as a self-organising process. This talk presents a methodology that uses genetic and cellular mechanisms inspired from biological morphogenesis to self-organise collective engineered systems, such as swarm robots. We show that the morphogenetic approach is able to self-organise swarm robots without a centralised control, which is nevertheless able to generate controlled global behaviors such as pattern formation. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the global behavior is adaptable to changing environments.