Designing Robotic Systems with Collective Embodied Intelligence (Talk)

Natural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evolutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals, it hinges on their morphology, their physical interactions, and the way they shape and leverage their environment. Mound-building termites, for instance, are believed to use their own body as a template for construction; the resulting dirt mound serves, among other things, to regulate volatile pheromone cues which in turn guide further construction and colony growth. Throughout this talk I will argue how we can leverage the same principles to achieve greater performance in robot collectives, by paying attention to the interplay between control and hardware, as well as direct- and environmentally-mediated coordination between robots. I will exemplify the strength and challenges of this approach through cell-inspired, soft, single- and multi-robot systems for exploration; micro-scale robots for bio-medical applications; bee- and termite-inspired multi-robot systems for construction- and excavation; and bio-hybrid systems for agricultural monitoring.