Bio-inspired algorithms to produce collaborative behaviors for robot teams

Researchers at the University of Surrey have recently developed self-organizing algorithms inspired by biological morphogenesis that can generate formations for multi-robot teams, adapting to the environment they are moving in. Their recent study, featured in IEEE Transactions on Cognitive … evelopmental Systems, was partly funded by the European Commission's FP7 program. "This research can be traced back to my previous work on morphogenetic robotics that applies genetic and cellular principles underlying biological morphogenesis to the self-organization of collective systems, such as robot swarms," Professor Yaochu Jin, a Surrey University Distinguished Chair and principal investigator on the study, told TechXplore. "Our main idea was to build a metaphor between cells in multi-cellular organisms and robots, including modules for reconfigurable modular robots." The main advantage of using morphological principles observed in nature to generate collective robot behavior is that these principles allow robots to self-organize themselves in a way that is'guided', 'predictable' or'controllable'.