Challenges of Achieving Biological-Scale Self-Assembly in Robotics by Petras Swissler.

Self-assembly, the process by which hundreds or even thousands of individuals link their bodies to form structure, is often viewed as a path towards achieving maximum adaptability in a swarm of robots. When comparing state of the art robotic systems to examples of self-assembly in biology, however, we see that whereas ants will form structures with hundreds of thousands of individuals, robots typically form structures with less than a dozen. This presentation examines some of the potential reasons for this difference, as well as presenting work by Dr. Swissler that seeks to close this gap.