Self-organization in robot swarms and beyond

Swarms of interacting simple robots are interesting because of their potential for adapting rapidly to the demands of different group tasks. They also provide a playground for studying the physics of emergent self-organization. We studied a closely packed ensemble of periodically deforming simple robots, and observed the group to spontaneously organize into orderly patterns of collective motion. Viewing the collective as an emergent whole, we characterized its dynamics using an analysis originally developed for understanding fruit-fly behaviors. Our findings point to design principles for the controlled stabilization of ordered behaviors in interacting systems.