Embryomorphic Engineering: Emergent Innovation Through Evolutionary Development
Embryomorphic Engineering, a particular instance of Morphogenetic Engineering, takes its inspiration directly from biological development to create new robotic, software or network architectures by decentralized self-assembly of elementary agents. At its
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Embryomorphic Engineering: Emergent Innovation Through Evolutionary Development René Doursat, Carlos Sánchez, Razvan Dordea, David Fourquet and Taras Kowaliw
Abstract Embryomorphic Engineering, a particular instance of Morphogenetic Engineering, takes its inspiration directly from biological development to create new robotic, software or network architectures by decentralized self-assembly of elementary agents. At its core, it combines three key principles of multicellular embryogenesis: chemical gradient diffusion (providing positional information to the agents), gene regulatory networks (triggering their differentiation into types, thus patterning), and cell division or aggregation (creating structural constraints, thus reshaping). This chapter illustrates the potential of Embryomorphic Engineering in different spaces: 2D/3D physical swarms, which can find applications in collective robotics, synthetic biology or nanotechnology; and nD graph topologies, which can find applications in distributed software and peer-to-peer techno-social networks. In all cases, the specific genotype shared by all the agents makes the phenotype’s complex architecture and function modular, programmable and reproducible.
This chapter is a condensed review version of references [16–22]. R. Doursat (B) · T. Kowaliw Complex Systems Institute Paris Ile-de-France (ISC-PIF), CNRS and Ecole Polytechnique, 57-59, rue Lhomond, 75005 Paris, France e-mail: [email protected] C. A. Sánchez Research Group in Biomimetics (GEB), Universidad de Málaga, C/ Severo Ochoa 4, PTA, 29590 Malaga, Spain R. Dordea · D. Fourquet Erasmus Mundus Masters in Complex Systems Science (EMMCS), Ecole Polytechnique, Route de Saclay, 91120 Palaiseau, France R. Doursat et al. (eds.), Morphogenetic Engineering, Understanding Complex Systems, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-33902-8_11, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
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11.1 Evolutionary Development Morphogenetic Engineering (ME), the topic of this book, concerns the design, or rather “meta-design”, of the self-organizing abilities of the elements of complex systems toward functional architectures. This meta-design, however, should not exclusively rely on human inventiveness as in traditional engineering disciplines but may also involve an important automation part, essentially via an evolutionary search. In that sense, by combining not only self-organization and architecture but also evolution, ME is very close to the tenets of evolutionary development, a recent and rapidly expanding field of biology nicknamed “evo-devo” [6, 8, 10, 11, 30, 40, 48, 58, 68].
11.1.1 Evo-Devo in Biology In the variation/selection couple of evolutionary biology, “selection” has received most of the honors while “variation” remained the neglected child. Darwin discovered the evolution of species, based on random mutations and nonrandom natural selection, and established it as a central fact of biology. During the same period, Mendel brought to light the laws of inheritance of traits. In the twentieth ce
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