Similar patterns of interaction, such as network motifs and feedback loops, are used in many
natural collective processes, probably because they have evolved independently under …

For robot swarms to operate outside of the laboratory in complex real-world environments,
they require the kind of error tolerance, flexibility, and scalability seen in living systems …

Large groups of animals aggregate around resource hotspots, with group size often
influenced by the heterogeneity of the environment. In most cases, the foraging success of …

Teams of robots can be organized to collectively complete complex real-world tasks, for
example collective foraging in which robots search for, pick up, and drop off targets in a …

The picture that emerges in this book is of sunlight flooding the Earth. Dotted about the
landscape are organisms: plants, animals, and microbes. Living things are found nearly …

Ants use individual memory and pheromone communication to forage efficiently. We
implement these strategies as distributed search algorithms in robotic swarms. Swarms of …

Desert seed-harvester ants, genus Pogonomyrmex, are central place foragers that search
for resources collectively. We quantify how seed harvesters exploit the spatial distribution of …

Collective foraging is a canonical problem in the study of social insect behavior, as well as in
biologically inspired engineered systems. Pheromone recruitment is a well-studied …

Individual robots are not effective at exploring large unmapped areas. An alternate approach
is to use a swarm of simple robots that work together, rather than a single highly capable …

Harvester ants are known to be species that collect seeds of plants and store them in
underground chambers. Workers forage solitarily or in groups, and the intensity of their …