Programming Methodology for Biologically-Inspired

s[1,2]. The system uses a novel approach: the desired global shape is specified at an "abstract" level as a folding construction on a continuous sheet of paper, which is then automatically compiled to produce the program run by the identically-programmed agents. The global-to-local compilation is achieved by using a set of five robust local primitives, inspired by cell differentiation in multicellular organisms such as the Drosophila. The compiler composes these primitive building blocks in a principled way using a set of geometry axioms from paper-folding (origami) mathematics. The resulting process is not only versatile in the shapes and patterns that can be formed, but also extremely reliable in the face of random agent distributions, varying numbers of agents and random agent death, without relying on global coordinates or centralized control. The process also exhibits interesting biological traits; for example, it is scale-independent --- the shape scales to the number of agents