Brief Announcement: An Effective Geometric Communication Structure for Programmable Matter

The concept of programmable matter envisions a very large number of tiny and simple robot particles forming a smart material that can change its physical properties and shape based on the outcome of computation and movement performed by the individual particles in a concurrent manner. We use geometric insights to develop a new type of shortest path tree for programmable matter systems. Our feather trees utilize geometry to allow particles and information to traverse the programmable matter structure via shortest paths even in the presence of multiple overlapping trees. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Computing