Ribosomal robots

摘要

The biological process of ribosomal assembly is one of the most versatile systems in nature. With only a few small building blocks, this natural process is capable of synthesizing the multitude of complex chemicals that form the basis of all organic life. This paper presents a robotics design and manufacturing scheme which seeks to capture some of the versatility of the ribosomal process. In this scheme, a custom "printer" folds a long ribbon of material in which control elements such as motors have been embedded into a morphology that is capable of accomplishing a pre-defined task. The evolved folding patterns are encoded with a special kind of compositional pattern producing network (CPPN), which can compactly describe patterns with regularities such as symmetry, repetition, and repetition with variation. This paper tests the efficacy of this design scheme and the effects of different ribbon lengths on the ability to produce walking robot morphologies. We show that a single strip of material can be folded into a variety of different morphologies displaying different forms of locomotion. Thus, the results presented here suggest a promising new method for the automated design and manufacturing of robotic systems.