Programmable self-assembly

Abstract

Electronics as well as mechanical components are shrinking and becoming cheaper and cheaper, therefore it is more and more important to keep the assembly costs of products as low as possible by efficient automation. One new approach is self-assembly, where components assemble themselves with the help of suitable surface coatings and patterns thereon. In this paper we analyse a new method that we call programmable self-assembly which is based on programmable interactions to perform the assembly process. Genetic algorithm is used to create interaction patterns for the proposed method.