Self-organizing Particle Systems

Abstract

Abstract-Nanoparticles are getting more and more in the focus of the scientific community since the potential for the development of very small particles interacting with each other and completing medical and other tasks is getting bigger year by year. In this work we introduce a distributed local algorithm for arranging a set of nanoparticles on the discrete plane into specific geometric shapes, for instance a rectangle. The concept of a particle we use can be seen as a simple mobile robot with the following restrictions: it can only view the state of robots it is physically connected to, is anonymous, has only a constant size memory, can only move by using other particles as an anchor point on which it pulls itself alongside, and it operates in Look-ComputeMove cycles. The main result of this work is the presentation of a random distributed local algorithm which transforms any given connected set of particles into a particular geometric shape. As an example we provide a version of this algorithm for forming a rectangle with an arbitrary predefined aspect ratio. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work that considers arrangement problems for these types of robots.

Infinite Object Coating in the Amoebot Model

“…However, we want all particles on the surface to move in a common direction. The simple procedure given in Algorithm 1, which is very similar to the moving algorithm presented by Drees et al [23], can be used to achieve this goal: A contracted particle uses Algorithm 1 Movement along a Surface let k be the size of the neighborhood of the particle (i.e., k = 6 or k = 10) let i be the label of an edge connected to the object while edge i is connected to the object do i ← (i − 1) mod k return i the procedure to compute the direction of an expansion, and an expanded particle simply contracts according to above definitions. The correctness of this approach is based on two facts.…”

Design of nanorobots for exposing cancer cells

“…Recent advances in controlling mechanisms in biological systems, such as cell signaling, cell movements and nano delivery devices for targeted treatments [2][3][4], motivates the need for further research in these areas. Computational models for programmable matters exist in computational geometry [5][6][7][8][9], synthetic biology [10][11][12], swarm robotics [13][14][15][16][17] and distributed computing [18,19]. DNA nanorobots fabricated using origami has also emerged recently as a promising research field for producible nanorobots [20,21].…”