Claytronics: an Instance of Programmable Matter

Abstract

Programmable matter (PM) has different meanings but they can be sorted depending on four properties: Evolutivity, Programmability, Autonomy and Interactivity. In my talk, I will present the Claytronics project which is an instance of PM, evolutive, programmable, autonmous and interactive. In Claytronics, PM is defined as a huge modular self-reconfigurable robot. To manage the complexity of this kind of environment, we propose a complete environment including programmable hardware, a programming langage, a compiler, a simulator, a debugger and distributed algorithms.