US scientists achieve robot swarm control inspired by birds and fish

US scientists have developed a novel framework for controlling robotic swarms inspired by the collective behaviors of birds, fish, and bees. The research addresses a central challenge in swarm robotics: creating a decentralized control mechanism that allows robots to coordinate effectively without a central leader. By introducing a new geometric design rule based on a quantity called “curvity,” which acts like an intrinsic charge influencing how robots curve in response to external forces, the team demonstrated that assigning positive or negative curvity values to individual robots can govern their interactions. This curvature-based control enables the swarm to exhibit different collective behaviors such as flocking, flowing, or clustering. The researchers successfully validated their approach through experiments showing that these simple, physics-inspired rules scale from pairs of robots to thousands, and can be embedded directly into the mechanical design of robots. This method simplifies swarm control from a complex programming challenge into a material science problem, potentially broadening applications from large industrial or delivery robots to microscopic robots used in medical treatments like targeted drug delivery.