Morphogenetic self-organization of collective movement without directional sensing

In this paper, we present a morphogenetic approach to self-organized collective movement of a swarm. We assume that the robots (agents) do not have global knowledge of the environment and can communicate only locally with other robots. In addition, we assume that the robots are not able to perform directional sensing. To self-organize such systems, we adopt here a simplified diffusion mechanism inspired from biological morphogenesis. A guidance mechanism is proposed based on the history of morphogen concentrations. The division of labor is achieved by type differentiation to allocate different tasks to different type of robots. Simulations are run to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm. The robustness of the algorithm is demonstrated by introducing an obstacle into the environment and removing a subset of robots from the swarm. © 2014 Springer International Publishing