Towards Physarum robots: computing and manipulating on water surface

Abstract

Plasmodium of Physarym polycephalum is an ideal biological substrate for implementing concurrent and parallel computation, including combinatorial geometry and optimization on graphs. We report results of scoping experiments on Physarum computing in conditions of minimal friction, on the water surface. We show that plasmodium of Physarum is capable for computing a basic spanning trees and manipulating of light-weight objects. We speculate that our results pave the pathways towards design and implementation of amorphous biological robots.

Submitted to Int J Intelligent and Robotic Systems, February 2008

References in corpus (2)

• Physarum machine: Implementation of Kolmogorov-Uspensky machine in biological substrat
• Universal computation with limited resources: Belousov-Zhabotinsky and Physarum computers

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