Professor Genaro J. Martínez, Professor Andrew Adamatzky and colleagues from the Unconventional Computing Lab (UCL), based at UWE Bristol, recently finished a multidisciplinary project where they constructed a new vigilance robot named “McIntosh I”. Involving the Artificial Life and Robotics Lab in Mexico and Unconventional Algorithms & Computation Lab in Czech Republic.
The main characteristic and difference with other similar robots around the world is that the navigation system is implemented with a new bio-algorithm based on a Physarum polycephalum complex cellular automata model.
Physarum polycephalum represents an enigmatic group of organisms known as the slime molds. Despite their name these organisms are not related with fungi, and form a genuine branch in the tree of life, beside plants, animals, and fungi. When Physarum takes up nutrient by its surface, the plasmodium will grow but still maintains coherence of the network structure. As a result, the network architecture is highly dynamic with flexible rearrangement of its junctions, following a decentralized and intelligent protocol of organisation.
The result will be presented in “The 15th International Workshop on Networking, Computing, Systems, and Software (to be held in conjunction with CANDAR’24) in Okinawa, Japan, from November 26 to 29 2024.
The results will be published in March 2025 in the Advances in Cellular Automata: Volume 1: Theory, and Advances in Cellular Automata: Volume 2: Computation and Applications