Smart Cellular Bricks: Collective Intelligence for the Physical World

Sakana AI has developed the Smart Cellular Bricks system, which cooperates without a central control unit by mimicking the self-organization principles of biological systems. The system consists of hundreds of simple 3D modules, each of which runs Neural Cellular Automata (NCA).

Each brick, without knowing its own position or the overall shape, exchanges only local information with physically connected neighboring bricks. Through this distributed interaction, the system as a whole gains the following capabilities:

• Shape classification: Collectively recognizes even modified 3D shapes it was not trained on
• Damage detection: Autonomously locates where modules are missing or broken
• Self-healing: Detects structural damage and induces a staged recovery

This research was conducted in collaboration between IT University of Copenhagen, Sakana AI, and Autodesk, and holds great significance in that it extends collective intelligence technology, which had remained confined to software, into the realm of physical hardware. It is expected to become a core technology for smart materials and reconfigurable robotics going forward.