Related papers: Toward Task Capable Active Matter: Learning to Avo…
Active matter physics and swarm robotics have provided powerful tools for the study and control of ensembles driven by internal sources. At the macroscale, controlling swarms typically utilizes significant memory, processing power, and…
Asymmetric obstacles can be exploited to direct the motion and induce sorting of run-and-tumbling particles. In this work, we show that flocking particles which follow the Vicsek model aligning rules experience a collective trapping in the…
Aggregation is a common behavior by which groups of organisms arrange into cohesive groups. Whether suspended in the air (like honey bee clusters), built on the ground (such as army ant bridges), or immersed in water (such as sludge worm…
Living collectives and artificial swarms frequently employ a division of labor, wherein individuals take on different tasks or perform different amounts of work. However, the mechanisms used by collectives to divide labor remain poorly…
Social insects in nature such as ants, termites and bees construct their colonies collaboratively in a very efficient process. In these swarms, each insect contributes to the construction task individually showing redundant and parallel…
Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…
In crowded environments, individuals must navigate around other occupants to reach their destinations. Understanding and controlling traffic flows in these spaces is relevant for coordinating robot swarms and designing infrastructure for…
We have developed an experimental setup of very simple self-propelled robots to observe collective motion emerging as a result of inelastic collisions only. A circular pool and commercial RC boats were the basis of our first setup, where we…
Emergent cooperative functionality in active matter systems plays a crucial role in various applications of active swarms, ranging from pollutant foraging and collective threat detection to tissue embolization. In nature, animals like bats…
This paper introduces collaborating robots which provide the possibility of enhanced task performance, high reliability and decreased. Collaborating-bots are a collection of mobile robots able to self-assemble and to self-organize in order…
Wasps, bees, ants and termites all make effective use of their environment and resources by displaying collective swarm intelligence. Termite colonies - for instance - build nests with a complexity far beyond the comprehension of the…
The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…
The sudden arrest of motion due to confinement is commonly observed via the clogging transition in the flow of particles through a constriction. We present results of a simple experiment to elucidate a similar transition in the…
Natural active systems routinely reshape and reorganize their environments through sustained local interactions. Examples of decentralized collective construction are common in nature, e.g., many insects achieve large-scale constructions…
In collective robotic systems, the automatic generation of controllers for complex tasks is still a challenging problem. Open-ended evolution of complex robot behaviors can be a possible solution whereby an intrinsic driver for pattern…
Crowd movements are observed among different species and on different scales, from insects to mammals, as well as in non-cognitive systems, such as motile cells. When forced to escape through a narrow opening, most terrestrial animals…
Swarm robotic systems are mainly inspired by swarms of socials insects and the collective emergent behavior that arises from their cooperation at the lower lever. Despite the limited sensory ability, computational power, and communication…
Collective animal behaviors are paradigmatic examples of fully decentralized operations involving complex collective computations such as collective turns in flocks of birds or collective harvesting by ants. These systems offer a unique…
In robot swarms operating under highly restrictive sensing and communication constraints, individuals may need to use direct physical proximity to facilitate information exchange. However, in certain task-related scenarios, this requirement…
Swarming behavior, where coherent motion emerges from the interactions of many mobile agents, is ubiquitous in physics and biology. Moreover, there are many efforts to replicate swarming dynamics in mobile robotic systems which take…