Taming the Swarm

In nature, thousands of individuals can cooperate to achieve complex goals from local interactions — from cells that form complex organisms, to social insects like ants and bees, to the complex and mesmerizing motion of fish schools and bird flocks. These systems are fascinating, especially to scientists and engineers. Even though each individual has limited ability, but as a collective, they appear to behave as one. What would it take to create our own artificial collectives of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? In this talk, Radhika Nagpal, Professor in Engineering at Princeton University, illustrates how biological swarms can inspire new forms of artificial intelligence and robotic systems.