Robust Morphogenesis of Robotic Swarms [Application Notes]

We presented a novel swarm-based framework for creating morphogenetic robotic swarms "with very simple kinetically interacting robots. Our framework assumes minimal complexity in those robots to coordinate their behaviors. The only explicit communication between robots is the one-time transmission of the recipe information from active to blank robots during the growth process. Once a robot is activated, it simply reacts kinetically to nearby robots and independently re-differentiates "with small probability. This architecture demonstrates dynamic production and maintenance of patterns, "which allows robust, adaptive behaviors under variable environmental conditions, including self-repair "with no central controller. The simplicity of individual modules assumed in our framework "will be a desirable property for low-cost hardware implementation in the future.