Pattern Formation in Mobile Computational Particles with Minimal Capabilities

Over the next decades, MEMS and nano-sensors will be everywhere. In this perspective, we envision the possibility of exploiting these technologies to build sorts of multicellular computational organisms, made up of millions of interacting autonomous computational particles, capable of assembling and dynamically re-assembling themselves into a variety of complex shapes (as the T1000 robot in the Terminator 2 movie). From a software perspective, the critical task is to identify appropriate (self)organization principles and programming methodologies for controlling the overall behavior of such complex systems. In particular, our goal is to study how and to which extent a group of mobile autonomous particles with the only capability of locally interacting with wireless links can be programmed to coordinate their respective movements to create variety of global shapes.