One potentially cost-effective approach to harvesting solar power from space is the use of thousands of individual robots moving in formation, each with a piece of solar panel attached, to form a solar panel array. In previous work, we demonstrated an algorithm that treats a group of robots as a 1-dimensional cellular automaton, which is able to establish formations defined by a single mathematical function. We now extend the algorithm to establish grid formations.
Ross Mead, Jerry B. Weinberg