Phototactic Supersmarticles
This addresses the challenge of implementing complex behaviors with minimal programming in robotics, though it appears incremental as it builds on prior work on smarticles and collective motion.
The paper tackled the problem of achieving directed locomotion in a collective of simple robots (smarticles) by forming a constrained ensemble called a supersmarticle, and showed that it can move toward or away from a light source with approximately Brownian motion resulting from chaotic interactions.
Smarticles, or smart active particles, are small robots equipped with only basic movement and sensing abilities that are incapable of rotating or displacing individually. We study the ensemble behavior of smarticles, i.e., the behavior a collective of these very simple computational elements can achieve, and how such behavior can be implemented using minimal programming. We show that an ensemble of smarticles constrained to remain close to one another (which we call a supersmarticle), achieves directed locomotion toward or away from a light source, a phenomenon known as phototaxing. We present experimental and theoretical models of phototactic supersmarticles that collectively move with a directed displacement in response to light. The motion of the supersmarticle is approximately Brownian, and is a result of chaotic interactions among smarticles. The system can be directed by introducing asymmetries among the individual smarticle's behavior, in our case by varying activity levels in response to light, resulting in supersmarticle biased motion.