Emergent behaviors in a bio-inspired platform controlled by a physical cellular automata cluster

Assaf, Tareq; Mayne, Richard; Adamatzky, Andrew; Melhuish, Chris

Abstract

This work illustrates behavior patterns and trajectories of a bio-inspired artificial platform induced by a cellular automata (CA)-based control strategy. The platform embeds both CA control as physical electronic architecture and a distributed hardware layer as effectors. In this work, we test both the functionality of the novel hardware’s components as well as the device’s capabilities in locomotion tasks. We also observe the trajectories and patterns emerging from different initial states of the CA excitation and hardware configurations. Two main result sets emerge from this study: the first set illustrates different trajectories according to different initial excitation of the physical CA controller layer. The second set suggests the potential of the developed platform for generating complex patterns of control, as well as indicating emergent characteristics similar to those common to morphological computation approaches in generating localized perturbations without affecting or notifying the central controller.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 19, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Aug 31, 2016
• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2016
• Deposit Date: Oct 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 10, 2016
• Journal: Biomimetics
• Electronic ISSN: 2313-7673
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 1
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics1010005
• Keywords: cellular automata, emergent behaviour, bio-inspired robotics, morphological computation
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/916530
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/biomimetics1010005
• Contract Date: Oct 10, 2016