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Issues in Self-Repairing Robotic Self-Assembly

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Morphogenetic Engineering

Part of the book series: Understanding Complex Systems ((UCS))

Abstract

Robot swarms provide interesting and potentially very useful examples of self-organizing systems. This chapter focuses on a specific approach, dubbed “active self-assembly”, for constructing arbitrary shapes with swarms of identical and identically programmed robots. Important, open issues are identified in the specific context of active self-assembly, but they are of more general applicability. Much of the discussion is centered on the fundamental problems of how to control a swarm to ensure that the structures it builds are self-repairing, and of how to assess the performance of self-assembling swarms.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the NSF under Grant DMI-02-09678, and the Okawa Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory for Molecular Robotics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, 90089, USA

    Daniel J. Arbuckle & Aristides A. G. Requicha

Authors
  1. Daniel J. Arbuckle
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  2. Aristides A. G. Requicha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Aristides A. G. Requicha .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut des Systèmes Complexes, Paris Ile-de-France, Ecole Polytechnique, rue Lhomond 57-59, Paris, 75005, France

    René Doursat

  2. Binghamton University, Dept. Bioengineering, State University of New York, Binghamton, 13902-6000, New York, USA

    Hiroki Sayama

  3. Faculté des Sciences et Technologie, Lab. LACL-EA 4219, Université Paris-Est Créteil, avenue due Général de Gaulle 61, Créteil Cedex, 94010, France

    Olivier Michel

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Arbuckle, D. ., Requicha, A. .G. (2012). Issues in Self-Repairing Robotic Self-Assembly. In: Doursat, R., Sayama, H., Michel, O. (eds) Morphogenetic Engineering. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33902-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33902-8_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33901-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33902-8

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