Chemotaxis-Inspired Cellular Primitives for Self-Organizing Shape Formation
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 chapter details our initial effort to create Morphogenetic Primitives (
- PDF / 1,979,665 Bytes
- 29 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 101 Downloads / 187 Views
Chemotaxis-Inspired Cellular Primitives for Self-Organizing Shape Formation Linge Bai and David E. Breen
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 chapter details our initial effort to create Morphogenetic Primitives (MPs), software agents that may be programmed to self-organize into userspecified 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.
9.1 Introduction Self-organization is a process that increases the order and complexity of a system as a result of local interactions among lower-level, simple components, without the imposition of external direction or control [10]. The main challenge when designing self-organization algorithms is how to convey a global desired result to a large number of lower-level individual primitives. More specifically, given a task expressed at a L. Bai · D. E. Breen (B) Geometric Biomedical Computing Group, Department of Computer Science, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA e-mail: [email protected] L. Bai e-mail: [email protected] R. Doursat et al. (eds.), Morphogenetic Engineering, Understanding Complex Systems, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-33902-8_9, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
209
210
L. Bai and D. E. Breen
global level, how can one design local interaction rules for lower-level components such that the local interactions among these components lead to the emergence of the global predefined behavior or structure? Our research looks to biology to answer this question, where examples of self-organizing systems are ubiquitous and copious. One example of self-organization in developmental biology is morphogenesis, where the shape or structure of an organism is formed due to cell shape change, movement, growth, adhesion and death. Morphogenesis is one of the fundamental components involved in the development of all complex organisms [29]. One of the essential processes involved in morphogenesis is chemotaxis [11]. Chemotaxis is the phenomenon where cells interact with other cells by emitting a chemical that diffuses into the surrounding environment. Neighboring cells detect the overall chemical concentration at the
Data Loading...
