Uploaded December 2020 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The IMA South West and Wales branch relaunch event was held on Thursday 26 November and featured talks about Mathematics in the Digital Age. This talk by Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol) explored Swarm Engineering Across Scales.
Abstract:
As tiny robots become individually more sophisticated, and larger robots easier to mass produce, a breakdown of conventional disciplinary silos is enabling swarm engineering to be adopted across scales and applications, from nanomedicine to treat cancer, to cm-sized robots for large-scale environmental monitoring. This convergence of capabilities is facilitating the transfer of lessons learned from one scale to the other. Cm-sized robots that work in the 10,000s may operate in a way similar to reaction-diffusion systems at the nanoscale, while sophisticated microrobots may have individual capabilities that allow them to achieve swarm behaviour reminiscent of larger robots with memory and communication. Although the physics of these systems are fundamentally different, much of their emergent swarm behaviour can be abstracted to their ability to move and react to their local environment. This presents an opportunity to build a unified framework for the engineering of swarms across scales that makes use of machine learning to automatically discover suitable agent designs and behaviours, realistic simulators to capture the physics of the agents, and general performance measures based on emergence. Such a framework would push the envelope of what swarm robotics is currently used for, bringing together active matter physics, collective behaviour research, synthetic biology and medicine towards the desire to engineer useful swarms.
The IMA South West and Wales branch relaunch event was held on Thursday 26 November and featured talks about Mathematics in the Digital Age. This talk by Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol) explored Swarm Engineering Across Scales.
Abstract:
As tiny robots become individually more sophisticated, and larger robots easier to mass produce, a breakdown of conventional disciplinary silos is enabling swarm engineering to be adopted across scales and applications, from nanomedicine to treat cancer, to cm-sized robots for large-scale environmental monitoring. This convergence of capabilities is facilitating the transfer of lessons learned from one scale to the other. Cm-sized robots that work in the 10,000s may operate in a way similar to reaction-diffusion systems at the nanoscale, while sophisticated microrobots may have individual capabilities that allow them to achieve swarm behaviour reminiscent of larger robots with memory and communication. Although the physics of these systems are fundamentally different, much of their emergent swarm behaviour can be abstracted to their ability to move and react to their local environment. This presents an opportunity to build a unified framework for the engineering of swarms across scales that makes use of machine learning to automatically discover suitable agent designs and behaviours, realistic simulators to capture the physics of the agents, and general performance measures based on emergence. Such a framework would push the envelope of what swarm robotics is currently used for, bringing together active matter physics, collective behaviour research, synthetic biology and medicine towards the desire to engineer useful swarms.
