Self-Organizing Shape and Pattern: From Cells to Robots

A starfish is an amazing creature. Like many multicellular organisms, it begins life as a single-cell egg that divides and develops through a complex program executed by identically programmed cells. Throughout its life, the starfish functions as a whole, even though it’s essentially a colony of cells that are constantly dying and being replaced. But even more remarkable is its ability to self-repair. Most starfish can grow back a severed limb, and some species can even grow back a body from a limb. If we wanted to create such a system, what would we tell the cells to do? Many people are interested in this question in different forms for different reasons. For example, it’s important to embedded systems composed of many identical parts, such as reconfigurable robots built from identical modules and network systems built from smart sensors scattered in the environment. Here I would like to address this question in the context of self-organizing shapes and patterns. This work began as part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Amorphous Computing project.1 This project has investigated many systems—from cells to robots. We’ve come to understand a great deal about how to engineer shape and even self-repair, but many things still remain unknown.