Related papers: Toward Task Capable Active Matter: Learning to Avo…

Lacking a universal law for granular flows across gravitational environments, fundamental processes such as hopper discharge remain vulnerable to failure in low gravity environments. A central challenge is clogging, the spontaneous arrest…

We study numerically how multiple deformable capsules squeeze into a constriction. This situation is largely encountered in microfluidic chips designed to manipulate living cells, which are soft entities. We use fully three-dimensional…

We derive from first principles a three-dimensional theory of self-propelled particle swarming in a viscous fluid environment. Our model predicts emergent collective behavior that depends critically on fluid opacity, mechanism of…

Many living and artificial systems show a similar emergent behavior and collective motions on different scales, starting from swarms of bacteria to synthetic active particles, herds of mammals and crowds of people. What all these systems…

Collective motion in animals and cells often exhibits rapid reorientations and scale-free velocity correlations. This allows information to spread rapidly through the group, allowing an adequate collective response to environmental changes…

Coordinating robotic swarms in dynamic and communication-constrained environments remains a fundamental challenge for collective intelligence. This paper presents a novel framework for event-triggered organization, designed to achieve…

The self-organised motion of vast numbers of creatures in a single direction is a spectacular example of emergent order. We recreate this phenomenon using actuated non-living components. We report here that millimetre-sized tapered rods,…

Active systems of self-propelled agents, e.g., birds, fish, and bacteria, can organize their collective motion into myriad autonomous behaviors. Ubiquitous in nature and across length scales, such phenomena are also amenable to artificial…

The spontaneous organization of collective activities in animal groups and societies has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the last decade. This kind of coordination often permits group-living species to achieve collective…

This study investigates the use of global control strategies to enhance the directed migration of swarms of interacting self-propelled particles confined in a channel. Uncontrolled dynamics naturally leads to wall accumulation, clogging,…

We combine experiments and numerical simulations to investigate the emergence of clogging in a system of interacting paramagnetic colloidal particles driven against a disordered landscape of larger obstacles. We consider a single aperture…

We present an experimental realization of the collective trapping phase transition [Kaiser et al., PRL 108, 268307 (2012)], using motile polar granular rods in the presence of a V-shaped obstacle. We offer a theory of this transition based…

We experimentally investigate the clogging process of granular materials in a two-dimensional hopper, and present a self-consistent physical mechanism of clogging based on preformed dynamic chain structures in the flow. We found that these…

Robots operating in everyday environments must navigate and manipulate within densely cluttered spaces, where physical contact with surrounding objects is unavoidable. Traditional safety frameworks treat contact as unsafe, restricting…

Robotic collectives are large groups (at least 50) of locally sensing and communicating robots that encompass characteristics of swarms and colonies, whose emergent behaviors accomplish complex tasks. Future human-collective teams will…

Swarm robotic systems utilize collective behaviour to achieve goals that might be too complex for a lone entity, but become attainable with localized communication and collective decision making. In this paper, a behaviour-based distributed…

Termites which are able to forage in the open can be often seen, in the field or in the lab: (i) wandering around, forming no observable pattern, or (ii) clustering themselves in a dense and almost immobile pack, or (iii) milling about in a…

We experimentally investigate the clogging and jamming of interacting paramagnetic colloids driven through a quenched disordered landscape of fixed obstacles. When the particles are forced to cross a single aperture between two obstacles,…

One of the main tasks for autonomous robot swarms is to collectively decide on the best available option. Achieving that requires a high quality communication between the agents that may not be always available in a real world environment.…

Natural flocks (aligned) and swarms (non-aligned) both exhibit features of near-criticality, challenging their treatment as two ends of the same phase transition. We present a model for the aggregation of active individuals, in which their…