October 9th, 2025; 14:00-17:30 JST --- Kyoto Sangyo-Kaikan Hall (room 4-F )
organized by
Luisa Damiano, Antonio Fleres, Yutetsu Kuruma, Andrea Roli, Pasquale Stano
A satellite workshop of The 2025 Conference on Artificial Life (ALIFE2025), Kyoto (Japan), 6-10 October 2025
Nowadays, the proliferation of advanced robotic technologies is significantly impacting various sectors of human activities, including industry, the military, healthcare, and social services. While these technologies demonstrate immense potential across a wide range of applications, they are also becoming increasingly interconnected. This growing interconnectivity between robots themselves, and with humans as well, is giving rise to collective robotic ecologies, emerging as a new “Gaian” force impacting human society, natural ecosystems, and other forms of technology. Recent analyses suggest that this network is starting to foster self-organization, and thus exhibit a form of autonomy. Relevant literature defines it as "robosphere," an emergent complex of robotic (eco)systems capable of self-regulation and interaction with the technosphere, anthroposphere, biosphere, and the broader environment.
The rise of the robosphere renders the notion that technological development can be directed through control strategies based on an atomistic view of technology obsolete. Specifically, this concept unites chemical nanorobots and electromechanical robots as two different facets of the same complex system, introducing new levels of complexity. The former operate at a molecular scale, interacting directly with biological and chemical systems, humans and their environments included; the latter function on a macroscopic scale, interfacing with the physical environment and humans. The convergence of the two could generate nonlinear dynamics, facilitating unprecedented scenarios in terms of both opportunities and risks.
In light of this potentially profound transformation, a systemic and integrative approach to sustainability is essential—one that can recognize and address the robosphere as a self-organizing complex system. Only by understanding the interdependencies between its components — from nanorobots operating within biological tissues to industrial robots restructuring production chains — will it be possible to develop governance strategies that ensure a sustainable balance between technological evolution, human needs, and the protection of global ecosystems.
Examination of the robosphere as a new form of self-organizing system. Participants will discuss how self-organizing robotic ecosystems can be understood through self-organizational and artificial life frameworks.
Exploration of multi-scale interactions. Inspired by ALIFE 2025’s focus on information encoding, the workshop will analyze how nanorobots operating at a molecular level and electromechanical robots interacting in the physical world can exchange signals, coordinate actions, and self-organize in ways reminiscent of natural biological systems.
Addressing sustainability and ethical considerations. The workshop will tackle the challenges of sustainability related to the emergent robosphere, considering both its environmental and societal impacts, as well as long-term strategies.
Development of a roadmap for cross-disciplinary research. By bringing together experts from different domains, the workshop will facilitate discussions on methodologies, experimental approaches, and theoretical frameworks related to a systemic and integrative approach to the robosphere.
Artificial life research has traditionally been divided into hardware, wetware, and software paradigms. This workshop provides a bridge between wetware (synthetic biology and molecular nanorobots) and hardware (electromechanical AI-driven robots), helping to unify these domains under a common research agenda. As ALIFE 2025 explores the “ciphers of life” — how living systems encode, process, and interpret information — this workshop intends to develop a timely exploration of how chemical and electromechanical robotic systems might do the same, through emergent, multi-scale, and self-organizing behaviors. Hence SB-AI 10 intends to invite researchers form scientific communities related to Artificial Life to join in this important discussion. As robotic systems become increasingly autonomous and interconnected, understanding their multi-scale interactions is crucial for shaping the future of artificial life in a sustainable and ethically responsible way.
What parallels exist between self-organizing robotic ecosystems and natural biological systems?
What role do molecular-level interactions (e.g., biochemical signaling in nanorobots) play in coordinating larger robotic structures?
How can bio-inspired models of cellular communication and swarm intelligence inform the design of multi-scale robotic ecosystems?
What are the potential social and ecological impacts of a large-scale interconnected robotic ecosystem? How might it interact with the biosphere, technosphere, and anthroposphere?
How can we ensure that self-organizing robotic systems develop in a way that is aligned with sustainability goals rather than reinforcing unsustainable linear economic paradigms?
What ethical frameworks should be established to regulate autonomous robotic ecosystems and prevent unintended consequences?
How can we synthetically/experimentally model and study the emergence of self-organization in robotic systems, and their co-evolution with biological/human systems?
How can disciplines such as systems biology, complexity science, and artificial life contribute to understanding, modeling, orienting the development of the robosphere?
Organizers
Luisa Damiano, IULM University; luisa.damiano@iulm.it
Antonio Fleres, IULM University; fleres.anto@gmail.com
Yutetsu Kuruma, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology; kuruma@elsi.jp
Andrea Roli, University of Bologna; andrea.roli@unibo.it
Pasquale Stano, University of Salento; pasquale.stano@unisalento.it
Thursday 9 October 2025, Room #4-F (& online)
K = keynote, S = selected
14:00-14:10 Organizers. Introduction
14:10-14:30 K1 Antonio Fleres. What is the Robosphere? An Epistemological Perspective.
14:30-14:50 S1 Fernando Rodriguez Vergara. The Self-Producing Automaton
14:50-15:10 S2 Hagen Lehmann. Educating for the Robosphere: A Critical Imperative for the Future of Social Organisation
15:10-15:30 K2 Shin-ichiro Nomura. Molecular Robots as Automatic Materials: Environmentally-Responsive Multi-Compartmental Systems
15:30-16:00 Coffee Break
16:00-16:20 S3 Francesco Bianchini. From Superorganism to Cognition: A Robosphere for Swarm Robotics
16:20-16:40 S4 Rebecca Mannocci. Modelling the Robosphere through Transgenic Art: A Bio-Aesthetic Inquiry
16:40-17:00 K3 Gentiane Venture. Reflections on our Experiences with Robots in the Wild
17:00-17:20 S5 Vipra Chopra. Architecture of Moral Responsability
17:20-17:30 Brief discussion and closing remarks
Lecce - Italy
Unit #1 - PI
MIlano - Italy
Unit #2
Bologna - Italy
Unit #3
This workshop has been organized within the PRIN-2022 project n. 20222HHXAX (Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca, Italy), entitled “Org(SBEAI) – An Organizational Approach to the Synthetic Modeling of Cognition based on Synthetic Biology and Embodied AI”, funded by the European Union, Next Generation EU, Mission 4, Component 1, CUP F53D23004560006
Website: https://sites.google.com/unisalento.it/prin-2022-org-sb-eai/home-page
Previous editions of the SB-AI workshop have been organized as satellite events at the following conferences:
ECAL 2013, Taormina, Italy (in presence)
ALIFE 14, New York, USA (in presence)
ECAL 2015, York, UK (in presence)
ECAL 2017, Lyon, France (in presence)
ALIFE 2018, Tokyo, Japan (in presence), link
ALIFE 2021, Prague, Czech Republic (online), link; 50 Years with Autopoiesis, link2
ALIFE 2022, Trento, Italy (online), link
ALIFE 2023, Sapporo, Japan (hybrid), link
ALIFE 2024, Copenhagen, Denmark (hybrid), link
ALIFE 2025, Kyoto, Japan (hybrid)
Paper Submission Deadline: 15 September 2025
Notification of Acceptance: 19 September 2025
Program publication on this website: 19 September 2025
Workshop Date: October 9th, 2025; 14:00-17:30 JST
Useful links: