Regenerating Soft Robots through Neural Cellular Automata

Neural cellular automata (CA) is a kind of cellular automaton (Figure 1). While cellular automata determine the state transition rule of cells by hand-making, neural CA obtains the transition rule by training a neural network. Recently, this neural CA has been shown to be a powerful tool in morphogenesis [1]. Mordvintsev et al. trained a neural CA to grow complex two-dimensional images starting from a few initial cells. Furthermore, authors also successfully trained it to regenerate a target pattern even if part of it is removed.