Artificial Plants - Vascular Morphogenesis Controller-guided growth of braided structures

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically inspired, decentralized growth control system for braided structures, enabling adaptive morphological development through collective decision-making and physical material addition, with potential applications in architecture.

Contribution

It presents a novel Vascular Morphogenesis Controller for artificial growth, integrating material continuity with decentralized sensing and decision-making in braided structures.

Findings

Successful implementation of a decentralized control system in braided structures.

Enabling physical morphological adaptation through collective node decisions.

Potential for autonomous and guided design in architectural applications.

Abstract

Natural plants are exemplars of adaptation through self-organisation and collective decision making. As such, they provide a rich source of inspiration for adaptive mechanisms in artificial systems. Plant growth - a structure development mechanism of continuous material accumulation that expresses encoded morphological features through environmental interactions - has been extensively explored in-silico. However, ex-silico scalable morphological adaptation through material accumulation remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present a novel type of biologically inspired modularity, and an approach to artificial growth that combines the benefits of material continuity through braiding with a distributed and decentralised plant-inspired Vascular Morphogenesis Controller (VMC). The controller runs on nodes that are capable of sensing and communicating with their neighbours. The nodes are embedded within the braided structure, which can be morphologically adapted based on collective decision making between nodes. Human agents realise the material adaptation by physically adding to the braided structure according to the suggestion of the embedded controller. This work offers a novel, tangible and accessible approach to embedding mechanisms of artificial growth and morphological adaptation within physically embodied systems, offering radically new functionalities, innovation potentials and approaches to continuous autonomous or steered design that could find application within fields contributing to the built environment, such as Architecture.