Robotic Organisms - Artificial Homeostatic Hormone System and Virtual Embryogenesis as Examples for Adaptive Reaction-Diffusion Controllers

Generating artificial organisms from robotic modules (cells) is a challenging and fascinating task. In this article, we discuss the most important challenges that such systems pose to the engineer and how these challenges are met by introducing bio-inspired mechanisms into the core functionality of such robotic systems. We develop a list of key functionalities that allow such a system to overcome the limitations of ‘monolithic’ single robotics. In addition, we elaborate on the similarities and differences of two bio-inspired control software architectures that support the unfolding of potential in multimodular reconfigurable robotics. We focus especially on issues like robustness and scalability and emphasize the power that arises from exploiting bio-inspired control mechanisms that show self-organization and evolutionary adaptation in such artificial ‘robotic organisms’.