Self-assembly from the point of view of its pieces

A graph grammar can be used to describe or direct the changing connection topology of a collection of, for example, self-organizing robots. Productions in a grammar describe the legal local interactions in which the robots may engage and the resulting global structures and processes that form can be analyzed by looking at the set of reachable graphs generated by the grammar. In this paper we discuss the relationship between a grammar and its characteristic automata set, which describes the trajectories of the grammar from the "point of view" of the components of the initial graph. The automata set of a grammar is essentially a Petri-Net description of these pathways and is related to the grammar as a metabolic network is related to a set of chemical reactions. It is useful for the analysis of the behavior of the grammar