Programmable Parts
The Programmable Parts Testbed is a stochastic self assembly experiment. Triangular robots are randomly stirred on an air table so that their motion cannot be directly controlled by the experimentor. However, the robots binding behavior with respect to other robots can be controlled by specifying local rules as a graph grammar. We showed how to create grammars to build arbitrary shapes by using the testbed as an instantiation of a Stochastic Chemical Reaction network. I did most of the electrical and mechanical design work for these robots as well as writing the embedded control software for interpreting graph grammars.