Macroscopic definition of distributed swarm morphogenesis

Abstract

In this paper, we present a system that will be able to obtain microscopic assembly behaviours for a robotic swarm to achieve an assembly target (macroscopic model). It will be designed taking into consideration the essential features of a self-assembling system needed to be implemented in a real robotic swarm. This system is composed of a typology of generative languages PD0L, and an algorithm for generating individual rules to be processed by the robots. The assembly process will be performed in a distributed manner, and will be also designed to require minimal communication capabilities between robots. Both the expressive capacities of language and the rule generation algorithm will be demonstrated by evaluating their performance with a core set of test morphologies widely used in self-assembly tasks. Furthermore, we compare the assembly time and the number of messages required between a classic controller (centralised) and our distributed approach.