Embryomorphic Engineering, a particular instance of Morpho-genetic Engineering, takes its inspiration directly from biological development
to create new hardware, software or network architectures by decentralized self-assembly of elementary agents. At its core, it combines three key principles of multicellular embryogenesis: chemical gradient di usion (providing
positional information to the agents), gene regulatory networks (triggering their diferentiation into types, thus patterning), and cell division (creating
structural constraints, thus reshaping). This chapter illustrates the potential
of Embryomorphic Engineering in di erent spaces: 2D/3D physical swarms,
which can nd applications in collective robotics, synthetic biology or nan-
otechnology; and nD graph topologies, which can nd applications in dis-
tributed software and peer-to-peer techno-social networks. In all cases, the
speci c genotype shared by all the agents makes the phenotype's complex
architecture and function modular, programmable and reproducible.
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