Experts look to plants and animals to discover the future of computers

Monday 18 March 2013

So experts at the Computing Department at the University of Surrey are joining forces with international colleagues to gain inspiration from plants and animals for achieving adaptive self-organising and self-healing technical systems.
An important example of such clever biology is multicellular organisation. The millions of cells, which make up an early embryo, can communicate only with their neighbours, and yet they are each capable of making the right decisions so that together they collaborate to build organs and whole bodies.
Understanding how they achieve this will not only benefit biomedical research, but could also help us to build more intelligent technology.
Professor Yaochu Jin, at University of Surrey, is leading the Nature Inspired Computing and Engineering (NICE) research group with its objective to develop computational models and algorithms inspired from natural intelligence and to solve complex practical problems.

He said: “Morphogenesis is an amazing biological process that shapes the body plan starting from a fertilised egg. Morphogenetic swarm robotics uses genetic and cellular mechanisms governing biological morphogenesis for self-organising swarm robots. It is a fascinating interdisciplinary new research area and this project provides a unique opportunity for promoting morphogenetic robotics.”   
The Project called “SWAM-ORGAN” tries to understand complex living systems such as cells making an organ, or the spatially-controlled growing of a plant, and to apply these principles to technological systems, in particular more intelligent and adaptable robot swarms – which are groups of simple robots working together to achieve goals more effectively.
The Project, with a £2 million budget, is funded by the European Commission and will be performed by researchers in Spain, United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The SWAM-ORGAN project focuses on systems containing large numbers of autonomous but relatively simple agents, whose goal is to collectively organise themselves into complex spatial arrangements despite each agent having only local awareness.
They form complex patterns and deal with conflict or damage by acting locally but for the benefit of the whole. “Although we originally came from the biological questions of embryo development, I’ve been increasingly fascinated by the potential similarities between multicellular organs, and robot swarms” explained James Sharpe, the coordinator of the project.
“The plan is that this project will be equally relevant to both fields, by focusing on the underlying organisational principles”.
The goal of the project is to identify the principles of these systems and use them to design a theoretical framework about distributed adaptive control. They will explore a specific approach, the gene regulatory networks, as a potentially powerful control method for these systems. Comparing networks between different biological systems, they will be able to identify patterns and fundamental principles that can be applied to technology.
The project is coordinated by Dr James Sharpe, acting coordinator of the Systems Biology Programme at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona.
The research partners are Professor Yaochu Jin, at Surrey, Dr Jaarp Kaandorp, Universiteit van Amsterdam and Dr Veronica Grieneisen, of the John Innes Centre based in Norwich.

Editors' Notes

The Centre for Genomic Regulation

CRG is an international biomedical research institute of excellence, created in December 2000. It is legally constituted as a non-profit foundation and has the participation from the Catalan Government through the Economy and Knowledge Department and the Health Department, as well as from the Pompeu Fabra University, and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Its mission is to discover and advance knowledge for the benefit of society, public health and economic prosperity.
The CRG believes that the medicine of the future depends on the groundbreaking science of today. This requires an interdisciplinary scientific team focused on understanding the complexity of life from the genome to the cell to a whole organism and its interaction with the environment, offering an integrated view of genetic diseases.

About the University of Surrey

The University of Surrey is one of the UK’s leading professional, scientific and technological universities with a world class research profile and a reputation for excellence in teaching and research. Ground-breaking research at the University is bringing direct benefit to all spheres of life – helping industry to maintain its competitive edge and creating improvements in the areas of health, medicine, space science, the environment, communications, defence and social policy. Programmes in science and technology have gained widespread recognition and it also boasts flourishing programmes in dance and music, social sciences, management and languages and law. In addition to the campus on 150 hectares just outside Guildford, Surrey, the University also owns and runs the Surrey Research Park, which provides facilities for 110 companies employing 2,750 staff.
The Sunday Times names Surrey as ‘The University for Jobs' which underlines the university’s growing reputation for providing high quality, relevant degrees.

About the John Innes Centre

The John Innes Centre, www.jic.ac.uk, is a world-leading research centre based on the Norwich Research Park, www.nrp.org.uk. The JIC’s mission is to generate knowledge of plants and microbes through innovative research, to train scientists for the future, and to apply its knowledge to benefit agriculture, human health and well-being, and the environment. JIC delivers world class bioscience outcomes leading to wealth and job creation, and generating high returns for the UK economy. JIC is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/.

About the Universiteit van Amsterdam

The University of Amsterdam (UvA) is a leading international research institution that values, promotes and rewards excellent research.
The UvA enables researchers to perform ground-breaking research combining a broad research palette with quality by investing selectively in research priority areas. Benchmarking provides the main basis for the continuous improvement of research achievements. The UvA evaluates the achievements of individual researchers by means of international recognition, in the form of prestigious grants, awards and prizes and/or admission to major academies of arts and science. The UvA invests in fundamental research and the resulting innovations.