Towards Physarum Robots: Computing and Manipulating on Water Surface

Plasmodium of Physarum polycephalum is an ideal biological substrate for implementing concurrent and parallel computation, including combinatorial geometry and optimization on graphs. The scoping experiments on Physarum computing in conditions of minimal friction, on the water surface were performed. The laboratory and computer experimental results show that plasmodium of Physarum is capable of computing a basic spanning tree and manipulating of light-weight objects. We speculate that our results pave the pathways towards the design and implementation of amorphous biological robots.