Tiny, self-assembling robots can swim and clamp onto particles and then release them when subjected to the right magnetic fields.
These mini robotic doughnuts spontaneously form from metal particles floating between a layer of oil and water, and could potentially be used to manipulate chemical reactions, deliver medical treatments in the body or clean surfaces.
“It’s really [...]

Dr. Dustin Reishus from the Correll lab at the University of Colorado will be teaching a course entitled "Swarm Intelligence and Self-Assembly" this fall. The course look at large-scale distributed systems in chemistry, biology, and robotics through the lens of mathematics and computer science. It will address such questions as:

How do ant colonies forage for [...]

Yesterday, PLoS ONE published my last article co-authored with my good friend Alexandre Campo, his students Olivier Dédriche and Mouhcine Zekkri, and Marco Dorigo (do I need to introduce him?). In this paper, we present a self-organizing mechanism that allows a group of individuals (in this case robots) to select a resource that matches its [...]

Next Wednesday (June 9th 2010), Professor Yan Meng invited me to give a talk at the Stevens Institute of Technology, near New-York. The lecture will hold at 2pm in room 204 of Babbio Center. The title of the seminar is "From biology to robotics, and back". Hereafter is the abstract:

During swarm robotics meetings, one can [...]

Prof. Yan Meng (Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Stevens Institute of Technology) and Prof. Yaochu Jin (Honda Research Institute Europe) are organizing a special workshop on "Bio-Inspired Self-Organizing Robotic Systems" during the next ICRA 2010 conference. The conference will hold from May 3 to May 8, 2010, in Anchorage, Alaska. The workshop will be [...]