RI-Small: Autonomous Microrobotic Swarms

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In nature, social insects have shown how mobility and multiplicity can be dramatically exploited: small ants effectively forage large areas, while tiny termites construct structures a million times their own size. Yet engineering a robotic swarm of similar complexity remains a significant challenge; we lack a fundamental understanding of how to effectively implement and leverage swarm behaviors. In this research we will design and implement a programmable microrobot swarm capable of robust collective intelligence in complex environments. Our project will focus on mobility and multiplicity: we seek to understand how scaling the agent size down and the swarm size up impacts the ability of collective networked systems. Our proposed work has two key threads: 1) the development of highly mobile insect-scale microrobots with biologically-derived locomotion principles and 2) the design and mathematical analysis of robust decentralized control paradigms which are broadly applicable to many self-organizing complex networks. To validate our approach, we will integrate the mechanical study of mobility and the algorithmic study of collectives through a set of annual demonstrations of microrobot swarms, which will enable continuous feedback between theory and engineering.