Experiments of Morphogenesis in Swarms of Simple Mobile Robots

In this paper we focus on the problem of having a multitude of very simple mobile robots self-organize their relative positions so as to obtain a variety of spatial configurations. The problem has a variety of applications in mobile robotics, modular robots, sensor networks, and computational self-assembly. The approach we investigate in this paper attempts at minimizing the local capability of robots and at verifying how and to which extent a variety of global shapes can be obtained by exploiting simple self-organizing algorithms and emergent behaviors. Several experiments are reported showing the effectiveness of the approach.