CAREER: Environmentally-Mediated Coordination in Natural and Robot Swarms

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Autonomous robot swarms are becoming ubiquitous with thousands of robots and drones operating simultaneously in places from warehouses to entertainment light shows. This technological revolution makes it critical to look beyond robots working in parallel, and towards actual swarm intelligence where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. As a proof of concept, natural swarms exhibit scalable, error tolerant, and adaptive properties by integrating and propagation information into their shared environment over space and time. Adoption of these concepts in robot swarms can complement existing control architectures, and may result in systems that are less efficient than those with centralized control architectures, but are much faster and inexpensive to deploy, are resilient to individual failures, resize easier from initial to full-scale deployment, and can adapt to changing tasks or environments. Although gaining in popularity, this type of distributed coordination has many facets and is still poorly understood - especially as a design tool for engineered swarms that aim to achieve biological levels of resilience and adaptability. To address these shortcomings, this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) research project will extend upon the concept of environmentally-mediated coordination from working on perfect robots operating in static environments, to include dynamic environments and ways to deal with realistic bounds on error and hardware reliability. The work will result in a model of swarms in dynamic environments that act to integrate, diffuse, decay, and filter information derived from characterization of a biological model system, as well as practical robot experiments. Practical verification involves collective robotic construction, odor plume tracking by honey bees, and strain-mediated behaviors in programmable matter. This project further involves aims to secure and increase such a diverse workforce through novel methods for inclusive, shared, online robotics curricula; cross-generational outreach programs for the public; interdisciplinary student projects; and workshops for researchers across the fields of robotics, biology, and architecture.This project is supported by the cross-directorate Foundational Research in Robotics program, jointly managed and funded by the Directorates for Engineering (ENG) and Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.