Swarm robotics and collective behavior

Swarm robotics embodies the collective intelligence and self-organization that emerges from simple, local interactions between autonomous simple agents that form a large group, without centralized coordination. Drawing inspiration from the emergent behavior exhibited by schools of fish, bird flocks and social insects, multi-robot systems are more robust, fault-tolerant and flexible than single robots, and therefore may be able to solve considerably more complex problems than single or few-robot systems can. Robot swarms have the potential to shed light on a variety of fundamental, interdisciplinary scientific questions, in addition to numerous applications. We study problems involving robot swarms including self-assembly, morphogenesis, target search and as physical realizations of  statistical mechanical models.