Morphogenetic self-organization of collective systems

Abstract

Self-organization 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 centralized control. Such systems are also supposed to be robust, self-repairable and highly adaptive. However, design of self-organizing systems is very challenging, particularly when the emerged global behaviors are required to be predictable.Morphogenesis is the biological process in which a fertilized 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-organizing process. This talk presents a methodology that uses genetic and cellular mechanisms inspired from biological morphogenesis to self-organize collective engineered systems, such as multi-robot systems and modular robots. We show that the morphogenetic approach is able to self-organize collective systems without a centralized control, which is nevertheless able to generate controlled global behaviors. Meanwhile, we demonstrate that the global behavior is adaptable to changing environments.