Cussat-Blanc, Sylvain, Pascalie, Jonathan, Mazac, Sebastien, Luga, Hervé and Duthen, Yves (2012) A Synthesis of the Cell2Organ Developmental Model. In: Morphogenetic Engineering Doursat, René, Sayama, Hiroki and Michel, Olivier (eds.) Springer. Chapter 14. pp. 353-381. ISBN 978-3-642-33901-1

Abstract

Over the past twenty years, many techniques have appeared to simulate artificial creatures at different scales: starting with the simulation of their behaviour at the beginning of the 90s, researchers have continued by modifying the robots’ morphologies to adapt them to their environment. More recently, developmental mechanisms of living beings have inspired artificial embryogenesis to generate smaller creatures composed of tens to thousands of cells. However, we observe that no traversal model, able to simulate creatures at these different scales, exists. Starting from a unique cell, our project’s goal is to develop a complete creature, which contains different organs and high-level functionalities. Thus, we propose a developmental model based on three layers of simulation. The first one consists in a chemical environment where cells can divide and manipulate substrates and chemical reactions. The aim is to develop a metabolism adapted to the environment. Often forgotten in classical models, this is crucial in all living systems. It allows every organism to perform actions in its environment with accumulated energy. Our developmental model also includes a physic layer that allows the creatures to produce global motion in a Newtonian world. Cells can here modify their shape to modify the shape of the organism. A hydrodynamic layer simulates substrate flows in the environment so that the cells can modify the whole environment. Finally, we propose a new method to get rid of the molecular morphogens by the mean of a L-System driven morphogenesis.