Biomimicry

Leaving breadcrumbs (well, pheronome trails) to lead the way. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10956014/

This article reports on a robot system inspired by how ants communicate using pheromone trails. Instead of real chemicals, the robots follow artificial “pheromone” signals so they can coordinate with one another and make group decisions in a similar way to ants.

Fractals! Ant colonies, materials like gases and liquids, and robot swarms may all follow a similar underlying pattern: lots of individuals behaving somewhat randomly, but still producing large-scale collective behaviour.

The algorithm models ant nest-selection behaviour to solve the “best-of-n” consensus problem using only local signalling. It demonstrates how response thresholds, recruitment, and biasing mechanisms enable robust distributed agreement without central control.

This paper explores a way for drones to communicate with each other visually, instead of relying on radio, by copying signalling ideas from animals like bees, deer, and peacocks.

The accelerator targets startups explicitly using biological signalling, coordination, and adaptation principles. These programs often surface applied implementations of swarm intelligence and collective sensing before they appear in formal literature.

Anyone remember smart dust? A cloud of sensors were thrown from a plane into a .. real cloud to study storms, wind patterns, etc.

This article says animals in groups, like bees, fish, or birds, can solve problems together through many small local interactions, and engineers are using those same ideas to build robot swarms that can act without a central controller.

8-10 June 2026 in sunny Germany. ANTS solicits contributions dealing with any aspect of swarm intelligence. Typical, but not exclusive, topics of interest are:

Here are 13 peer-reviewed publications on the infrastructure to make embodied intelligence possible. In order you will find: 1. Human–robot object handover This review surveys how robots pass objects to people and receive them back, framing handover as a foundational capability for human–robot collaboration.

From Sheffield research to “natural intelligence” Opteran Technologies (registered in the UK as Opteran Technologies Limited) is a spin-out from University of Sheffield that formally incorporated in March 2020.

adappt’s heritage is in its name. Read all parts to this series: In part one, we reviewed what was adappt.io, from 2015 to 2024.