1 June 2012
Radhika Nagpal
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Harvard University
Social insects and cells show many striking similarities in the way they solve problems collectively — task differentiation, symmetry-breaking, synchronization, self-assembly. In the first half of the talk, my goal is to explore (interactively) the following question: is it possible to identify a catalog of "problems & solutions" that have evolved for collective decision-making? In the second half of the talk I will describe and show some demonstrations of the kilobot robot swarm system that we have developed to study collective behaviors.