Title
Metachronal Waves in Cellular Automata: Cilia-Like Manipulation in Actuator Arrays.
Abstract
Paramecium is covered by cilia. It uses the cilia to swim and transport food particles to its mouth. The cilia are synchronised into a collective action by propagating membrane potential and mechanical properties of their underlying membrane and the liquid phase environment. The cilia inspired us to design and manufacture a hardware prototype of a massively parallel actuator array, emulated membrane potentials via a discrete excitable medium controller and mechanical properties based on vibrating motors. The discrete excitable medium is a two-dimensional array of finite automata, where each automaton, or a cell, updates its state depending on states of its closest neighbours. A local interaction between the automata lead to emergence of propagating patterns, waves and gliders. The excitable medium is interfaced with an array of actuators. Patterns travelling on an automaton array manifest patterns of actuation travelling along the array of actuators. In computer models and laboratory experiments with hardware prototypes we imitate transportation of food towards mouth pore of the Paramecium. The hardware actuator arrays proposed could in future replace simple manipulators in demanding micro-scale application.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1007/978-3-319-01692-4_20
Studies in Computational Intelligence
Keywords
Field
DocType
cellular automata,multi-agent systems,natural collaboration
Cellular automaton,Topology,Control theory,Excitable medium,Massively parallel,Simulation,Computer science,Automaton,Finite-state machine,Food particles,Actuator
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
512
1860-949X
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.48
6
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ioannis Georgilas1183.59
andrew adamatzky21180163.89
David R. W. Barr3174.74
Piotr Dudek423933.48
Chris Melhuish574787.61