The same pulling force that causes "tears" in a glass of wine also shapes embryos. It's another example of how genes exploit mechanical forces for growth and development. Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the that these wine "tears" or "legs" result from the difference in surface tension between alcohol and water. "This fact affords an explanation of several very curious motions," Thomson wrote.

Unlike most human-engineered systems, biological systems are emergent from low-level interactions, allowing much broader diversity and superior adaptation to the complex environments. Inspired by the process of morphogenesis in nature, a bottom-up design approach for robot morphology is proposed to treat a robot's body as an emergent response to underlying processes rather than a predefined shape. This paper presents Loopy, a "Swarm-of-One" polymorphic robot testbed that can be viewed simultaneously as a robotic swarm and a single robot. Loopy's shape is determined jointly by self-organization and morphological computing using physically linked homogeneous cells. Experimental results show that Loopy can form symmetric shapes consisting of lobes. Using the the same set of parameters, even small amounts of initial noise can change the number of lobes formed. However, once in a stable configuration, Loopy has an "inertia" to transfiguring in response to dynamic parameters. By making the connections among self-organization, morphological computing, and robot design, this paper lays the foundation for more adaptable robot designs in the future.

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'.

As space exploration geared up in the 1960s, scientists were faced with a new dilemma. How could they recognize life on other planets, where it may have evolved very differently--and therefore have a different chemical signature--than it has on Earth? James Lovelock, father of the Gaia theory, gave this advice: Look for order. Every organism is a brief upwelling of structure from chaos, a self-assembled wonder that must jealously defend its order until the day it dies. Sophisticated information processing is necessary to preserve and pass down the rules for maintaining this order, yet life is built out of the messiest materials: tumbling chemicals, soft cells, and tangled polymers.