Award details

Genetically-Programmable Self-Patterning Swarm Organs

Reference	BBS/E/J/000CA546
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Dr Veronica Grieneisen
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	John Innes Centre
Department	John Innes Centre Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	102,676
Status	Current
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/03/2013
End date	30/09/2016
Duration	42 months

Abstract

This project focuses on exploring and exploiting biological mechanisms of morphogenesis for abstract and technological systems, such as robot swarms. In particular, by transferring and studying these mechanisms in artificial systems, we hope to understand better emergent behaviour within plant developmental. The collective self-organisation into complex spatial arrangements despite each agent having only local awareness is directly relevant to both biological morphogenesis, and to new paradigms of distributed technology such as robotic swarms and amorphous computing. Two levels of adaptation are either evident or required in these systems: (1) As the whole system changes over time, individual agents find themselves in different local situations and must adapt and adjust their behaviour accordingly, for example dealing with conflict resolution and/or cooperation with neighbours. (2) The swarm must also adapt to the outside world (or the world it is embedded in) in various ways depending on its task – for example, coping with damage, maintaining functionality under changing environmental conditions, or tracking objects. A fundamental challenge in this field is how to design the local control system of each agent, and the Swarm-Organ project will extensively explore a specific approach – namely the use of GRNs (gene regulatory networks) – as a potentially powerful control method for these systems. By focusing on GRNs we will develop a theoretical framework about distributed adaptive control, which will be equally informative to both natural biological morphogenesis, as well as next generation technologies in robotics and computation. Parallel to this, we will add fundamental features of plant-like structures to the swarms, and investigate the plasticity and robustness of de novo plant organ formation (in silico, in robots and in planta).

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Not funded via Committee
Research Topics	Plant Science, Synthetic Biology
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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