Swarm-Intelligence

Georgia Tech researchers developed swarms of simple robotic particles that coordinate and self-organize without electronics, software, or sensing, relying entirely on physical design and local interactions.

By encoding interaction rules directly into physical structure, researchers showed that coordinated group behavior can emerge without digital control, sensors, or centralized systems.

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.

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.