Coordinating swarms of microscopic agents to assemble complex structures

Abstract

This chapter addresses the problem of coordinating very large swarms of microscopic agents to assemble complex, hierarchically structured physical systems. The agents might be microscopic robots or genetically engineered microorganisms. The approach we use is a form of artificial morphogenesis, which studies the self-organized morphogenetic processes in the developing embryo, by which billions of cells cooperate to create physical form and abstracts these processes to control microscopic agents to assemble desired physical structures. We use an approach based on the description of morphogenetic processes by partial differential equations, which ensures that our morphogenetic algorithms will scale up to arbitrarily large swarms (millions or more). We present several simulation experiments demonstrating the coordination of massive swarms to construct complex objects.