Photomorphogenesis for robot self-assembly: adaptivity, collective decision-making, and self-repair
Self-assembly in biology is an inspiration for engineered large-scale multi-modular systems with
desirable characteristics, such as robustness, scalability, and adaptivity. Previous works have
shown that simple mobile robots can be used to emulate and study self-assembly behaviors. However,
many of these studies were restricted to rather static and inflexible aggregations in predefined
shapes, and were limited in adaptivity compared to that observed in nature. We propose a
photomorphogenesis approach for robots using our vascular morphogenesis model —a light-stimuli
directed method for multi-robot self-assembly inspired by the tissue growth of trees. Robots in the
role of ‘leaves’ collect a virtual resource that is proportional to a real, sensed environmental
feature. This is then used to build a virtual underlying network that shares a common resource
throughout the whole robot aggregate and determines where it grows or shrinks as a reaction to the
dynamic environment. In our ap...
Source: Bioinspiration and Biomimetics - Category: Science Authors: Mohammad Divband Soorati, Mary Katherine Heinrich, Javad Ghofrani, Payam Zahadat and Heiko Hamann Source Type: research