Swarm-Intelligence

Honeybees do more than just follow the “direction and distance” in another bee’s waggle dance. They seem to combine that message with their own memory of landmarks in the landscape, so they can form an expectation of what the route should look like and fly more efficiently.

This paper looked at how honey bees pass on food-location information through the waggle dance, and found that these recruitment networks are actually quite thin rather than densely connected.

This study shows ants make faster pheromone-guided decisions in low-distraction environments, suggesting that signal clarity vs. environmental noise is a critical factor in stigmergic coordination.

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.

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.

This paper describes an improved ant-inspired algorithm for finding good paths, such as routes for robots or navigation systems. Instead of searching too randomly, it puts more attention on promising areas early, strengthens better routes as it learns, and discourages unnecessary turns, so it finds smoother and better paths faster.

This paper describes a new way for groups of robots to make a shared choice, based on how ants seem to decide on the best new nest.

This paper looks at how robot swarms can move more smoothly by not only reacting to what nearby robots are doing now, but also by briefly predicting where they are about to move next.

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: