Swarm of One: Bottom-up Emergence of Stable Robot Bodies from Identical Cells

TL;DR

This paper introduces Loopy, a bottom-up emergent robot system inspired by biological morphogenesis, demonstrating how identical cells can self-organize into stable, adaptable shapes with potential for more flexible robot designs.

Contribution

It presents a novel morphogenetic robot testbed that combines self-organization and morphological computing to produce emergent, stable shapes from homogeneous components.

Findings

Loopy can form symmetric lobed shapes.

Initial noise influences the number of lobes formed.

Stable configurations exhibit inertia against shape changes.

Abstract

Unlike most human-engineered systems, biological systems are emergent from low-level interactions, allowing much broader diversity and superior adaptation to the complex environments. Inspired by the process of morphogenesis in nature, a bottom-up design approach for robot morphology is proposed to treat a robot's body as an emergent response to underlying processes rather than a predefined shape. This paper presents Loopy, a "Swarm-of-One" polymorphic robot testbed that can be viewed simultaneously as a robotic swarm and a single robot. Loopy's shape is determined jointly by self-organization and morphological computing using physically linked homogeneous cells. Experimental results show that Loopy can form symmetric shapes consisting of lobes. Using the the same set of parameters, even small amounts of initial noise can change the number of lobes formed. However, once in a stable configuration, Loopy has an "inertia" to transfiguring in response to dynamic parameters. By making the connections among self-organization, morphological computing, and robot design, this paper lays the foundation for more adaptable robot designs in the future.