Optimal Seeding of a Class of Self-Reproducing Systems

This paper is motivated by the need to minimize the payload mass required to establish an extraterrestrial robotic colony. One approach for this minimization is to deploy a colony consisting of individual robots capable of self-reproducing. An important consideration for the establishment of such a colony is the identification of a seed. Since self-reproduction is achieved by the actions of a robot on available resources, a seed for the colony consists of a set of robots and a set of resources. Previous approaches to the seeding problem included certain restrictive assumptions about the self-reproducing system under consideration, possibly yielding seeds with an excessive number of resources. The algorithms were also incapable of seeding self-reproducing systems where the production of copies of progenitor robots required the assistance of their offspring. This paper outlines a novel algorithm to determine an optimal seed for a more general class of self-reproducing systems. Here, optimality is understood as the minimization of a cost function of the resources and robots, and the class of self-reproducing systems is more general because it allows the generation of a copy of a robot to depend on the assistance of its offspring. Illustrations of the algorithm are provided.