Evolving and Controlling Behaviors in a Computation-Free Robot Swarm

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, and colonies of ants exhibit a remarkable robustness and resilience, despite the limited capabilities of each individual. Recently, research into bio-inspired swarm robotics has been gaining popularity due to the low-cost, robust, redundant, and distributed nature of swarms. Potential applications for robot swarms include search and rescue, construction, and chemical spill cleanup, as well as nano-medical applications such as finding tumors. Many of these applications would benefit from simple, cheap, disposable swarms of robots that can accomplish these tasks quickly and without much human supervision.