FieldVMC: an asynchronous model and platform for self-organising morphogenesis of artificial structures

The vascular morphogenesis controller (VMC) is an approach to structure development inspired by the way plants branch and distribute nutrients. It has proven useful to guide shape formation in modular robotics as well as resource distribution in hierarchically-structured organisations, such as large companies. In this work, we propose FieldVMC: a generalisation of VMC, founded on the field-based approach known as aggregate computing, which is applicable to arbitrary topologies (i.e., undirected graphs rather than trees) and supports asynchronous and decentralised execution. We redesign VMC as a field-based computation, hence enabling the emergence of organisational hierarchies out of self-organising interactions among local entities. The benefits of our approach are manifold. Being decentralised and free from topological constraints, our approach makes VMC applicable to arbitrary networks; being based on a well-known computational model, inheriting scalability, asynchronicity, and self-organising capabilities; being implemented in a functional field-based computation framework, fostering reuse and composability. To support our claims, we conduct in-silico quantitative experiments comparing FieldVMC with the original VMC. The results demonstrate that FieldVMC is a monotonic extension of VMC, offering (i) faster convergence, and (ii) enhanced capabilities for capturing, analyzing, and engineering novel phenomena.