Evolutionary Morphogenetic Self-organization of Swarm Robots

This chapter presents various gene-regulated models for self-organizing swarm robots based on a metaphor between multi-cellular morphogenesis and pattern generation of swarm robots. It starts from a simple genetic network model that can generate a predefined pattern to a hierarchical gene regulatory network that can generate patterns that are adaptively generated based on the changing positions of targets to be surrounded. Then, gene regulatory networks that can generate patterns that cover a region rather than the boundary only are presented. Following this, gene regulatory networks that are evolved based on simple motifs are used to generate patterns for swarm robots, thus lifting the requirement to manually define the structure of the hierarchical gene regulatory network. Finally, reaction-diffusion models are adopted for simplistic robots to format patterns and follow moving targets.