Growing bio-inspired shapes with a 300-robot swarm

Our work published today in Science Robotics describes how we grow fully self-organised shapes using a swarm of 300 coin-sized robots. The work was led by James Sharpe at EMBL and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona – together with my team at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and University of Bristol. Here's a video summarising the results, or you can read the paper here: Nature is capable of producing impressive functional shapes throughout embryonic development. Broadly, there are two ways to form these shapes. Cells have access to information about their position through some coordinate system, for example generated through their molecular gradients.