What is Substance

This chapter addresses the problem of coordinating the behavior of very large numbers of microrobots to assemble complex, hierarchically structured physical objects. The approach is patterned after morphogenetic processes during embryological development, in which masses of simple agents (cells) coordinate to produce complex three-dimensional structures. To ensure that the coordination mechanisms scale up to hundreds of thousands or millions of microrobots, the swarm is treated as a continuous mass using partial differential equations. A morphogenetic programming notation permits algorithms to be developed for coordinating dense masses of microrobots. The chapter presents algorithms and simulations for assembling segmented structures (artificial spines and legs) and for routing artificial neural fiber bundles. These algorithms scale over more than four orders of magnitude.