This book examines the evolution of self-organised multicellular structures, and the remarkable transition from unicellular to multicellular life. It shows the way forward in developing new robotic entities that are versatile, cooperative and self-configuring.

This book is devoted to the study of the evolution of self-organised multicellular structures and the remarkable transition from unicellular to multicellular life. Multicellular organisms provide the inspiration for the development of novel principles of adaptation and evolution for robotics and, in particular, for so-called multi-robot organisms. Multi-robot organisms are defined as large-scale swarms of robots that can physically dock with each other and symbiotically share energy and computational resources within a single "artificial-life-form". When it is advantageous to do so, these robots can dynamically aggregate and self-assemble into one or many symbiotic organisms in order to collectively interact with the physical world via a variety of sensors and actuators. Bio-inspired evolutionary paradigms, combined with robot embodiment and swarm-emergent phenomena, enable the organisms to autonomously manage their own hardware and software organisation. In this way, artificial robotic organisms become self-configuring from both hardware and software perspectives. This could lead to not only extremely adaptive, evolve-able and scalable robotic systems, but robot organisms also able to reprogram themselves without human supervision and new, previously unforeseen, functionality to emerge. This book introduces new concepts for symbiotic robot organisms and reports on experience of researching and developing such systems. In the long term it is intended to apply this experience in the construction and maintenance of real-world technical systems based on these concepts.

Recent research results in the emerging field of Symbiotic Robotics Written by experts in the field State of the art book on symbiotic multi-robot organisms

Autorentext
Paul Levi is Full Professor for Informatics in the Institute for Parallel and Distributed Systems of the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated in physics and computer science and became a senior research scientist in informatics and robotics, and Head of the Department of Technical Expert Systems and Robotics at the University of Karlsruhe. In 1988 he was appointed Professor at the Technical University of Munich, and scientific member of the Bavarian Center for Knowledge-Based Systems. Later on he served as Director of the Institute for Parallel and Distributed High Performance Computers at the University of Stuttgart. He is Member of the Management Board of the Centre for Computer Science (FZI) and Director of the Division Intelligent Systems and Production Engineering (ISPE), Karlsruhe, Germany. Paul Levi's main research fields include computer vision, robotics, distributed AI and multi-agent systems. He has authored and co-authored both textbooks and monographs.

Inhalt
Concepts of Symbiotic Robot Organisms.- Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Systems.- Cognitive Approach in Artificial Organisms.- Adaptive Control Mechanisms.- Learning, Artificial Evolution and Cultural Aspects of Symbiotic Robotics.- Final Conclusions.