Abstract:
Motivated by the ability of living cells to form specific shapes and
structures, we are investigating chemotaxis-inspired cellular primitives
for self-organizing shape formation. This paper details our initial
effort to create Morphogenetic Primitives (MPs), software agents that
may be programmed to self-organize into user-specified 2D shapes.
The interactions of MPs are inspired by chemotaxis-driven aggregation
behaviors exhibited by actual living cells. Cells emit a chemical into
their environment. Each cell responds to the stimulus by moving in
the direction of the gradient of the cumulative chemical field
detected at its surface. The artificial chemical fields of individual
MPs are explicitly defined as mathematical functions. Genetic programming
is used to discover the chemical field functions that produce an
automated shape formation capability. We describe the cell-based
behaviors of MPs and a distributed genetic programming method that
discovers the chemical fields needed to produce macroscopic shapes from
simple aggregating primitives. Several examples of aggregating MPs
demonstrate that chemotaxis is an effective paradigm for spatial
self-organization algorithms.
