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

Birds in a flock move in a correlated way, resulting in large polarization of velocities. A good understanding of this collective behavior exists for linear motion of the flock. Yet observing actual birds, the center of mass of the group…

Collective motion inspired by animal groups offers powerful design principles for autonomous aerial swarms. We present a bio-inspired 3D flocking algorithm in which each drone interacts only with a minimal set of influential neighbors,…

Bacteria can spontaneously develop collective motions by aligning their motions in dense systems. Here, we show that bacteria can also respond collectively to an alternating electrical field and form dynamic clusters oscillating at the same…

The collective ability of organisms to move coherently in space and time is ubiquitous in any group of autonomous agents that can move and sense each other and the environment. Here we investigate the origin of collective motion and its…

Natural groups of animals, such as swarms of social insects, exhibit astonishing degrees of task specialization, useful to address complex tasks and to survive. This is supported by phenotypic plasticity: individuals sharing the same…

The spontaneous emergence of collective flows is a generic property of active fluids and often leads to chaotic flow patterns characterised by swirls, jets, and topological disclinations in their orientation field. However, the ability to…

Populations of agents often exhibit surprising collective behavior emerging from simple local interactions. The common belief is that the agents must posses a certain level of cognitive abilities for such an emerging collective behavior to…

Navigating networked robot swarms often requires knowing where to go, sensing the environment, and path-planning based on the destination and barriers in the environment. Such a process is computationally intensive. Moreover, as the network…

One of the most important promises of decentralized systems is scalability, which is often assumed to be present in robot swarm systems without being contested. Simple limitations, such as movement congestion and communication conflicts,…

The formation of groups of interacting individuals improves performance and fitness in many decentralised systems, from micro-organisms to social insects, from robotic swarms to artificial intelligence algorithms. Often, group formation and…

Robot swarms have been shown to improve the ability of individual robots by inter-robot collaboration. In this paper, we present the PuzzleBots - a low-cost robotic swarm system where robots can physically couple with each other to form…

Collective decision-making arises from individual agents integrating their own personal observations with information obtained from social partners. In many biological systems that exhibit collective decision-making, the process by which…

We introduce a simple model of self-propelled agents connected by linear springs, with no explicit alignment rules. Below a critical noise level, the agents self-organize into a collectively translating or rotating group. We derive…

Collective and directed motility or swarming is an emergent phenomenon displayed by many self-organized assemblies of active biological matter such as clusters of embryonic cells during tissue development, cancerous cells during tumor…

Current artificial intelligence systems show near-human-level capabilities when deployed in isolation. Systems of a few collaborating intelligent agents are being engineered to perform tasks collectively. This raises the question of whether…

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, insects swarms are examples of coordinated motion of a group that arises spontaneously from the action of many individuals. Here, we study flocking behavior from the viewpoint of multi-agent reinforcement…

Systems of self-propelled particles are known for their tendency to aggregate and to display swarm behavior. We investigate two model systems, self-propelled rods interacting via volume exclusion, and sinusoidally-beating flagella embedded…

The limited energy capacity of individual robotic agents in a swarm often limits the possible cooperative tasks they can perform. In this work, we investigate the problem of covering an unknown connected grid environment (e.g. a maze or…

It is difficult for robots to retrieve objects in densely cluttered lateral access scenes with movable objects as jamming against adjacent objects and walls can inhibit progress. We propose the use of two action primitives -- burrowing and…

Construction throughout history typically assumes that its blueprints and building blocks are pre-determined. However, recent work suggests that alternative approaches can enable new paradigms for structure formation. Aleatory…