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Robotic collectives inspired by biological cells

A robotic system has been demonstrated in which the random motion of individual components leads to deterministic behaviour, much as occurs in living systems. Environmental and medical applications could follow.
  1. Metin Sitti

    1. Metin Sitti is in the Physical Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany, and at the School of Medicine and the School of Engineering, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey.

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In biological systems, large-scale behaviour can be achieved by the collective coupling and coordination of stochastically (randomly) moving small-scale components. For example, living cells aggregate and migrate collectively during the healing of wounds and when cancer spreads. Inspired by these biological mechanisms, in a paper in Nature, Li et al.1 report a collective robotic system in which deterministic locomotion is a result of the stochastic movement of many loosely coupled, disc-shaped components. The results show that stochasticity offers a promising approach to developing large-scale, collective robotic systems that exhibit robust deterministic behaviour.

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Nature 567, 314-315 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00839-x

References

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