REPLICATOR (Robotic Evolutionary Self-Programming and Self-Assembling Organism) is a European Commission founded project that focuses on the development of an advanced robotic system, consisting of a large-scale swarm of autonomous mobile robots that are capable of self-assembling into artificial organisms. These robotic organisms possess common energy and information buses as well as reliable legged, wheeled or climbing locomotions, based on modular subsystems which can be autonomously reconfigured. Thanks to the heterogeneity of the elementary robots and their capability to share resources and to communicate, the robotic organisms are able to achieve large computational power, and rich close- and far-range sensing. The energy is autonomously harvested from external power sources.

The main goal of the project is to develop novel principles underlying these robotic organisms, such as self-configuration, self-adjustment and self-learning. The bio-inspired evolutionary approaches and evolvable hardware structures adopted in this project enable the robotic organisms to emerge new functionalities, to develop their own cognitive and control structures and, finally, to work autonomously in uncertain situations without any human supervision.

A possible application of these robotic organisms is to build autonomous sensor networks, capable of self-spreading and self-maintenance in open-ended, even hazardous, environments, due to the organism's extremely adaptive, robust, and scalable capabilities. With over fifty scientists from eight different European countries, the REPLICATOR and SYMBRION projects are together the largest research project in the field of modular robotics in the world.