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Self-Organizing Swarms and Robotics
Towards Collective "Artificial" Intelligence: In nature, groups of thousands to millions of individuals can cooperate to create complex structure purely through local interactions -- from cells that form complex organisms, to social insects like termites that build meter-high mounds and army ants that self-assemble into bridges and nests, to the complex and mesmerizing motion of fish schools and bird flocks. What makes these systems so fascinating to scientists and engineers alike, is that even though each individual has limited ability, as a collective they achieve tremendous complexity. So much so, that we begin to think and reason about the collective as a single entity with a mind of its own.
What would it take to create our own artificial collectives of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? Together with my group (my "collective intelligence" :-)), I've worked on this question from many angles: theory, robotics, and biology. We develop bio-inspired robots and algorithms for collective intelligence, drawing inspiration from social insects, fish schools, and multicellular organization. We also investigate models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells and insects cooperate to achieve complex tasks. We build LOTS of robots in the lab! And travel with biologists to study animal societies in the wild. A common theme in all of our work is understanding the relationship between local and global behavior: how does collective autonomy arise from many locally interacting and decentralized agents, and how can we design the computational interactions and physical embodiment of individual agents to achieve the global behaviors we want.
To learn more about my research, watch my TED talk (April 2017, below) below or visit the SSR Lab website to see details on our projects, publications and lab accomplishments.
Towards Collective "Artificial" Intelligence: In nature, groups of thousands to millions of individuals can cooperate to create complex structure purely through local interactions -- from cells that form complex organisms, to social insects like termites that build meter-high mounds and army ants that self-assemble into bridges and nests, to the complex and mesmerizing motion of fish schools and bird flocks. What makes these systems so fascinating to scientists and engineers alike, is that even though each individual has limited ability, as a collective they achieve tremendous complexity. So much so, that we begin to think and reason about the collective as a single entity with a mind of its own.
What would it take to create our own artificial collectives of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? Together with my group (my "collective intelligence" :-)), I've worked on this question from many angles: theory, robotics, and biology. We develop bio-inspired robots and algorithms for collective intelligence, drawing inspiration from social insects, fish schools, and multicellular organization. We also investigate models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells and insects cooperate to achieve complex tasks. We build LOTS of robots in the lab! And travel with biologists to study animal societies in the wild. A common theme in all of our work is understanding the relationship between local and global behavior: how does collective autonomy arise from many locally interacting and decentralized agents, and how can we design the computational interactions and physical embodiment of individual agents to achieve the global behaviors we want.
To learn more about my research, watch my TED talk (April 2017, below) below or visit the SSR Lab website to see details on our projects, publications and lab accomplishments.
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