Assuming that plants behave like colonies with many independent but connected parts, this text describes a board design to emulate a cellular automata principle as a solution to biomimetic those organisms. The developed hardware speculates the behaviour of nodes as a result of the conditions of their neighbours, simulating the concept of a small world. Each designed board easily accommodates one to four neighbours connected by cable wiring. A firmware was also produced. It helped to read the states of the neighbouring sensors and actuators before a node made a local decision. Using the board, we built a robotic plant composed of five flowers/nodes whose individual behaviour is codependent on the neighbours’ behaviour. This extended abstract presents the preliminary results of this experiment.

This paper demonstrates the introduction of a symbiogenesis inspired technique as an additional method for the evolutionary process into an adaptive multi-agent system called Morphogenesis. It was created in 2012 to represent the life process as an artwork, allowing the experience of what escapes our perception scale: The evolutionary process. To do so, Morphogenesis uses genetic algorithms to create visual abstract compositions with emergent artificial intelligence. It generates agents with locomotion, feeding, confrontation and reproduction behaviors, as well as more social ones, such as collaboration or submission. All of these behaviors are programmed into the agents’ level and, from its interactions, collective patterns emerge. The collective interactions influence individual adaptation and maintenance over time, simulating natural selection. Nevertheless, as the previous versions of the system were based on the small-step mutation of the evolutionary process, the system's ecology tend to adapt with big colonies, making the aesthetic experience less diverse to the public. In this paper, we compare the results of the original system with a new one using symbiogenesis as the inspiration for an evolutionary leap. The symbiogenesis technique allowed the system to create different dynamics and diverse representations in its probabilistic arrangements, simulating the diversity of natural life inside its restricted environment.