Morphogenetic Robotics: A New Paradigm for Designing Self-Organizing, Self-Reconfigurable and Self-Adaptive Robots

Chapter
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Abstract

By morphogenetic robotics, we mean a class of methodologies for designing self-organizing, self-reconfigurable and self-adaptive robots inspired by biological morphogenesis. We categorize these methodologies into three areas, namely, morphogenetic swarm robotic systems, morphogenetic modular robots and morphogenetic co-design of body and brain for robots. We also discuss the relationship between morphogenetic robotics and a few closely related areas in robotics, such as epigenetic robotics, which focuses on cognitive development in robotic systems, and evolutionary robotics, which is concerned with evolutionary design of robot controllers. A few examples are provided to illustrate the main ideas underlying the morphogenetic approaches to robotics.

Keywords

Gene Regulatory Network NURBS Curve Neighboring Module Modular Robot Evolutionary Robotic 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Notes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Hongliang Guo, Yuyang Zhang, Till Steiner, Lisa Schramm and Benjamin Inden for the illustrative examples used in this chapter. YJ is grateful to Edgar Körner and Bernhard Sendhoff for their support.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of ComputingUniversity of SurreyGuildfordUK
  2. 2.Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringStevens Institute of TechnologyHobokenUSA

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