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Connecting the Dots: Molecular Machinery for Distributed Robotics

  • Conference paper
DNA Computing (DNA 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5347))

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Abstract

Nature is considered one promising area to search for inspiration in designing robotic systems. Some work in swarm robotics has tried to build systems that resemble distributed biological systems and inherit biology’s fault tolerance, scalability, dependability, and robustness. Such systems, as well as ones in the areas of active self-assembly and amorphous computing, typically use relatively simple components with limited computation, memory, and computational power to accomplish complex tasks, such as forming paths in the presence of obstacles. We demonstrate that such tasks can be accomplished in the well-studied tile assembly model, a model of molecular self-assembly that is strictly simpler than other biologically-inspired models. Our systems use a small number of distinct components to find minimal-length paths in time linear in the length of the path while inheriting scalability and fault tolerance of the underlying natural process of self-assembly.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Yuriy Brun & Dustin Reishus

Authors
  1. Yuriy Brun
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  2. Dustin Reishus
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Science and Engineering and (by courtesy) Computer Science, Stanford University, Terman 311, Stanford, 94305, CA, USA

    Ashish Goel

  2. Physics Department, TU Munich, Garching, Germany

    Friedrich C. Simmel

  3. Institute of Computer Science, Faculty of Philosophy and Science, Silesian University, Bezručovo nám. 13, 74601, Opava, Czech Republic

    Petr Sosík

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Brun, Y., Reishus, D. (2009). Connecting the Dots: Molecular Machinery for Distributed Robotics. In: Goel, A., Simmel, F.C., Sosík, P. (eds) DNA Computing. DNA 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5347. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03076-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03076-5_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-03075-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-03076-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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