Neural Cellular Automata for Decentralized Sensing Using a Soft Inductive Sensor Array for Distributed Manipulator Systems

In Distributed Manipulator Systems (DMS), decentralization is a highly desirable property as it promotes robustness and facilitates scalability by distributing computational burden and eliminating singular points of failure. However, current DMS typically utilize a centralized approach to sensing, such as single-camera computer vision systems. This centralization poses a risk to system reliability and offers a significant limiting factor to system size. In this work, we introduce a decentralized approach for sensing in Distributed Manipulator Systems using Neural Cellular Automata (NCA). Demonstrating decentralized sensing in a hardware implementation, we present a novel inductive sensor board designed for distributed sensing and evaluate its ability to estimate global object properties, such as the geometric center, through local interactions and computations. Experiments demonstrate that NCA-based sensing networks accurately estimate object position at 0.24 times the inter-sensor distance. They maintain resilience under sensor faults and noise and scale seamlessly across varying network sizes. These findings underscore the potential of local, decentralized computations to enable scalable, fault-tolerant, and noise-resilient object property estimation in DMS.