Amorphous Computing

The goal of amorphous computing is to identify organizationalprinciples and create programming technologies for obtainingintentional, pre-specified behavior from the cooperation of myriadunreliable parts that are arranged in unknown, irregular, andtime-varying ways. The heightened relevance of amorphous computingtoday stems from the emergence of new technologies that could serve assubstrates for information processing systems of immense power atunprecedentedly low cost, if only we could master the challenge ofprogramming them. This document is a review of amorphous computing

Distributed Swarm Formation Using Mobile Agents

This chapter presents decentralized control algorithms for composing formations of swarm robots. The robots are connected by communication networks. They initially do not have control program to compose formations. Control programs that implement our algorithm are introduced later from outside as mobile software agents. Our controlling algorithm is based on the pheromone communication of social insects such as ants. We have implemented the ant and the pheromone as mobile software agents. Ant agents control the robots. Each ant agent has partial information about the formation it is supposed to compose. The partial information consists of relative locations with neighbor robots that are cooperatively composing the formation. Once the ant agent detects an idle robot, it occupies that robot and generates the pheromone agent to attract other ant agents to the location for neighbor robots. Then the pheromone agent repeatedly migrates to other robots to diffuse attracting information. Once the pheromone agent reaches the robot with an ant agent, the ant agent migrates to the robot closest to the location pointed by the pheromone agent and then drives the robot to the location. We have implemented simulators based on our algorithm and conducted experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach

Tissue engineering: state of the art in oral rehabilitation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/74998/1/j.1365-2842.2009.01939.x.pd

Robustness Analysis and Failure Recovery of a Bio-Inspired Self-Organizing Multi-Robot System

Jin Y, Guo H, Meng Y. Robustness Analysis and Failure Recovery of a Bio-Inspired Self-Organizing Multi-Robot System. In: 2009 Third IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems. IEEE; 2009: 154-164.Biological systems can generate robust and complex behaviors through limited local interactions in the presence of large amount of uncertainties. Inspired by biological organisms, we have proposed a gene regulatory network (GRN) based algorithm for self-organizing multiple robots into different shapes. The self-organization process is optimized using a genetic algorithm. This paper focuses on the empirical analysis of robustness of the self-organizing multi-robot system to the changes in tasks, noise in the robot system and changes in the environment. We investigate the performance variation when the system is optimized for one shape and then employed for a new shape. The influence of noise in sensors for distance detection and self-localization on the final positioning error is also examined. In case of a complete self-localization failure, we introduce a recovery algorithm based on trilateration combined with a Kalman filter. Finally, we study the system's performance when the number of robots changes and when there are moving obstacles in the field. Various simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient in shape formation and that the self-organizing system is robust to sensory noise, partial system failures and environmental changes