Programmable self-assembly using biologically-inspired multiagent control

This paper presents a programming language that species a robust process for shape formation on a sheet of identically programed agents, by combining local organization primitives from epithelial cell orphogenesis and Drosophila cell differentiation with combination rules from geometry. This work represents a significantly different approach to the design of self-organizing systems: the desired global shape is specified using an abstract geometry-based language, and the agent program is directly compiled from the global specification. The resulting self-assembly process is extremely reliable in the face of random agent distributions, random agent death and varying agent numbers, without relying on global coordinates or centralized control.

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