The concept of cellular robotic system

Abstract

The author discusses the conceptual basis for the theory and engineering of a new type of robotic system. The system is composed of autonomous robotic units which accomplish tasks in cooperation. After describing the relevance of this system and contrasting it with cellular automata and neural networks, the author establishes the fundamental properties of the system and their consequences for the structure of the robotic units, the space on which they operate, and the algorithms by which they accomplish the global tasks. The significance of the concept of cellular robotic systems for distributed computing, molecular computing, self-organization, and reliability is explained.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>