Hybrid Centralized/Decentralized Control of Bacteria-Based Bio-Hybrid Microrobots

Engineering microrobotic systems using a bio-hybrid approach that couples synthetic materials with live cells is a powerful approach to address some of the challenges in micro/nanotechnology such as providing an on-board power source and efficient means of locomotion. In the last decade, a number of centralized control strategies dependent on native biological mechanisms have been demonstrated; however, decentralized cooperative control of a swarm of bio-hybrid microrobots has not been shown before. In this work, we impart bacteria with engineered biological circuits to facilitate agent-agent communication and enable predictable and robust cooperative control of a network of bacteria-based Biohybrid microrobots. We show a hybrid control strategy wherein a centralized control scheme is used to direct migration and a decentralized control scheme enables the agents to independently coordinate a desired behavior (fluorescent protein expression). We use an experimentally-validated agent-based computational model of the system to demonstrate the utility of the approach. We show that spatial organization plays a significant role in the response dynamics and explore how the system could be tuned for particular applications. The model will serve as an essential tool for predictive design of bio-hybrid microrobotic swarms with a tunable and robust response.