The aquatic unicellular organism Paramecium caudatum uses cilia to swim around its environment and to graze on food particles and bacteria. Paramecia use waves of ciliary beating for locomotion, intake of food particles and sensing. There is some evidence that Paramecia pre-sort food particles by discarding larger particles, but intake the particles matching their mouth cavity. Most prior attempts to mimic cilia-based manipulation merely mimicked the overall action rather than the beating of cilia. The majority of massive-parallel actuators are controlled by a central computer; however, a distributed control would be far more true-to-life. We propose and test a distributed parallel cilia platform where each actuating unit is autonomous, yet exchanging information with its closest neighboring units. The units are arranged in a hexagonal array. Each unit is a tileable circuit board, with a microprocessor, color-based object sensor and servo-actuated biomimetic cilia actuator. Localized synchronous communication between cilia allowed for the emergence of coordinated action, moving different colored objects together. The coordinated beating action was capable of moving objects up to 4 cm/s at its highest beating frequency; however, objects were moved at a speed proportional to the beat frequency. Using the local communication, we were able to detect the shape of objects and rotating an object using edge detection was performed; however, lateral manipulation using shape information was unsuccessful.
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机译：水生单细胞生物草履虫（Paramecium caudatum）利用纤毛在其周围游动并在食物颗粒和细菌上吃草。 Paramecia使用纤毛拍打声波来运动，摄取食物颗粒并进行感应。有证据表明，Paramecia通过丢弃较大的颗粒对食物颗粒进行预分类，但摄入的颗粒与他们的口腔匹配。之前大多数模仿纤毛操纵的尝试都只是模仿了整体动作，而不是模仿纤毛。大多数大规模并联执行器是由中央计算机控制的。但是，分布式控制将更加真实。我们提出并测试了分布式并行纤毛平台，其中每个执行单元都是独立的，但仍与其最邻近的单元交换信息。这些单元以六边形阵列排列。每个单元都是一块可拼接的电路板，带有微处理器，基于颜色的对象传感器和伺服致动仿生纤毛致动器。纤毛之间的局部同步通信允许出现协调动作，将不同颜色的对象一起移动。协调的拍打动作能够以最高的拍打频率将物体移动到4 cm / s。但是，对象以与拍频成比例的速度移动。使用本地通信，我们能够检测物体的形状并使用边缘检测来旋转物体。但是，使用形状信息进行横向操纵是不成功的。
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