Bio-inspired Self-Organizing Morphogenetic Robotic Systems

Professor Yan Meng

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA

Biological systems, from macroscopic swarm systems of social insects to microscopic cellular systems, can generate robust and complex emerging behaviors through relatively simple local interactions subject to various kinds of uncertainties.  Embryonic development of multi-cellular organisms is governed by gene regulatory networks (GRNs), which are a collection of genes that interact with each other and with other chemicals in the cell. Inspired by the major principles of gene regulation and cellular interactions in multi-cellular development, we aim to replicate biological robustness by organizing complex behaviors from locally interacting individuals, and eventually provide a framework for the design and analysis of self-organizing morphogenetic robotic (MR) systems.  In this talk, I mainly focus on two types of MR systems: self-organizing swarm morphogenetic robots (SMR) and self-reconfigurable modular morphogenetic robots (MMR).  For SMR, a hierarchical morphogenetic approach has been developed to allow the swarm robots to autonomously form various complex patterns and cover the boundaries of protected areas, where the systems can self-organize to adapt to changing environments. For MMR, two different hierarchical morphogenetic models have been developed to allow the modular robots to dynamically reconfigure their structures to adapt to different task requirements and environmental changes.