paper:doi-10-1126-scirobotics-aau9178Morphogenesis in robot swarms
Original abstract (expand)
Endowing robot swarm systems with biological morphogenetic behavior makes swarm shape formation emergent, adaptive, and robust. Morphogenesis allows millions of cells to self-organize into intricate structures with a wide variety of functional shapes during embryonic development. This process emerges from local interactions of cells under the control of gene circuits that are identical in every cell, robust to intrinsic noise, and adaptable to changing environments. Constructing human technology with these properties presents an important opportunity in swarm robotic applications ranging from construction to exploration. Morphogenesis in nature may use two different approaches: hierarchical, top-down control or spontaneously self-organizing dynamics such as reaction-diffusion Turing patterns. Here, we provide a demonstration of purely self-organizing behaviors to create emergent morphologies in large swarms of real robots. The robots achieve this collective organization without any self-localization and instead rely entirely on local interactions with neighbors. Results show swarms of 300 robots that self-construct organic and adaptable shapes that are robust to damage. This is a step toward the emergence of functional shape formation in robot swarms following principles of self-organized morphogenetic engineering.
Related work— refs + corpus + external arXiv
Cited / in-corpus / arXiv badges show which signals surfaced each row. Multi-source rows weighted higher.
- Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesisAusten RD Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Dominic K Devlin2025≈ 78%
- Swarm of One: Bottom-up Emergence of Stable Robot Bodies from Identical CellsR. Michael Butts, Nathan Adkins, Yu Gu Trevor Smith2023≈ 78%
- Closing the Loop on Morphogenesis: A Mathematical Model of Morphogenesis by Closed-Loop Reaction-DiffusionMichael Levin Joel Grodstein2022≈ 78%
- ≈ 77%
- Microelectronic Morphogenesis: Progress towards Artificial OrganismsDaniil Karnaushenko, Minshen Zhu and Oliver G. Schmidt John S. McCaskill2024≈ 77%
- Swarms, Phase Transitions, and Collective IntelligenceLANL and Santa Fe Institute) Mark M. Millonas (Center for Nonlinear Studies and Theoretical Division2008≈ 77%
- Mechanics of Morphogenesis in Neural Development: in vivo, in vitro, and in silicoHamed Seyyedhosseinzadeh, Zheng Ao, Haning Xiu, Kun Gou, Feng Guo, and Zi Chen Joseph Sutlive2022≈ 76%
- Engineering morphogenesis of cell clusters with differentiable programmingFrancesco Mottes, Ariana-Dalia Vlad, Michael P. Brenner, Alma dal Co Ramya Deshpande2025≈ 76%
- ≈ 75%
- Adaptive walks in a gene network model of morphogenesis: insights into the Cambrian explosionPau Fernandez, Stuart A. Kauffman Ricard V. Sole2007≈ 75%
- Internalized Morphogenesis: A Self-Organizing Model for Growth, Replication, and Regeneration via Local Token Exchange in Modular SystemsTakeshi Ishida2026≈ 74%
- On the Implicit and on the Artificial - Morphogenesis and Emergent Aesthetics in Autonomous Collective SystemsVitorino Ramos2007≈ 74%
- ≈ 74%
- ≈ 74%
- Simulating Tissue Morphogenesis and SignalingSimon Tanaka, Patrick Fried, Philipp Germann and Denis Menshykau Dagmar Iber2013≈ 73%
- ≈ 70%
- ≈ 70%
- Darwin's agential materials: evolutionary implications of multiscale competency in developmental biologyin corpus2023≈ 69%
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substratesin corpus2024≈ 67%
- ≈ 67%
- ≈ 66%
- Developmental Bioelectricity: the cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mindin corpus2023≈ 66%
- The computational boundary of a 'self': developmental bioelectricity drives multicellularity and scale-free cognitionin corpus2019≈ 66%
- Endless forms most beautiful 2.0: teleonomy and the bioengineering of chimaeric and synthetic organismsin corpus2023≈ 66%
- Life as we know itin corpus2013≈ 65%
- Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Gluein corpus2024≈ 65%
- ≈ 65%
- ≈ 65%
- ≈ 64%
- Simulators — LessWrongin corpus≈ 64%
Similar preprints — Semantic Scholar
Cited by (5)
- Design for an Individual: Connectionist Approaches to the Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality
Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) require interaction structures among lower-level units that compute non-linearly separable functions — the same class of functions that single-layer Pe
- Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates
Collective intelligence, understood as William James' capacity to reach the same goal by different means, operates not only in beehives and ant colonies but as a scale-free organizing principle across
- Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior
Bongard and Levin argue that the longstanding debate over whether living things are machines has been conducted against a 20th-century, static definition of 'machine' that modern engineering has alrea
- The collective intelligence of evolution and development
Watson and Levin argue that evolutionary individuality, organismic individuality, and cognition are coextensive — the causal structures necessary to produce fitness that belongs to a collective rather
- Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence
Levin and Lyons argue that the price system in market economies is not merely a resource-allocation device but the canonical instantiation of what they term a *cognitive glue* — a coordinating afforda