Swarm robots that “bloom” could enable adaptive building skins

Researchers built modular “SGbots” that communicate locally and collectively adjust their shape—blooming or retracting—to regulate sunlight in real-world window tests.

The system demonstrates distributed coordination and fault tolerance, where individual failures are compensated by neighbors, pointing toward deployable swarm-based building control systems.

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-swarms-mini-robots-bloom-architecture.html