From Assembly to Birth: A CMOS-Compatible Developmental Architecture for Robotic Systems

This dissertation proposes a novel paradigm for robotic and hardware system design in which a functional system is born through a developmental process rather than assembled through predefined construction. Inspired by biological morphogenesis but formulated entirely within computational and electrical engineering principles, the proposed framework introduces a decentralized, energy-aware developmental architecture that grows from a single initialized seed. Each developmental unit executes a shared generative genome and operates solely on local information, enabling growth, differentiation, and termination without global control or explicit design of final morphology. The framework is formally modeled as a discrete dynamical system and mapped to a CMOS-compatible abstraction, where growth is interpreted as progressive activation of pre-fabricated hardware cells under energy constraints. A prototype-oriented architecture is presented, along with detailed design considerations for FPGA emulation and future ASIC implementation. A comprehensive experimental evaluation methodology is defined to quantify growth dynamics, stability, energy efficiency, robustness to faults, and scalability. Results demonstrate that complex and stable structures can emerge autonomously from a single seed, while tolerating defective substrates and resource limitations. By reframing robotic construction as a birth process rather than manufacturing, this work establishes a new direction for adaptive, fault-tolerant, and scalable hardware systems. The proposed paradigm challenges conventional assumptions in electrical engineering and opens new research avenues in developmental robotics, reconfigurable hardware, and self-organizing systems.