  Unlike most human-engineered systems, biological systems are emergent from
low-level interactions, allowing much broader diversity and superior adaptation
to the complex environments. Inspired by the process of morphogenesis in
nature, a bottom-up design approach for robot morphology is proposed to treat a
robot's body as an emergent response to underlying processes rather than a
predefined shape. This paper presents Loopy, a "Swarm-of-One" polymorphic robot
testbed that can be viewed simultaneously as a robotic swarm and a single
robot. Loopy's shape is determined jointly by self-organization and
morphological computing using physically linked homogeneous cells. Experimental
results show that Loopy can form symmetric shapes consisting of lobes. Using
the the same set of parameters, even small amounts of initial noise can change
the number of lobes formed. However, once in a stable configuration, Loopy has
an "inertia" to transfiguring in response to dynamic parameters. By making the
connections among self-organization, morphological computing, and robot design,
this paper lays the foundation for more adaptable robot designs in the future.
