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 counter intuitive,” said physicist Igor Aranson, co-author of a study in Nature Materials, August 7. “There is nothing fancy about magnetic particles, you can just buy them. But if you pour them on the surface of a liquid, you can form robots which can do something useful.”(…)

Read the rest of this article by Danielle Venton on Wired.com: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/self-assembling-robots/

• How do ant colonies forage for food?
• Why do cockroaches tend to aggregate in clumps?
• How can we design robotic swarms to do what we want them to?
• How can we design molecular computers using self-assembling DNA molecules?

All of these problems are related. All of them have large numbers of individual agents (be they bugs, robots, or molecules) acting independently to accomplish some goal. The students will explore behavior of these systems using a variety of mathematical techniques.

For more information, you can visit the course webpage.

When selecting a resource to exploit, an insect colony must take into account at least two constraints: the resource must be abundant enough to sustain the whole group, but not too large to limit exploitation costs, and risks of conflicts with other colonies. Following recent results on cockroaches and ants, we introduce here a behavioral mechanism that satisfies these two constraints. Individuals simply modulate their probability to switch to another resource as a function of the local density of conspecifics locally detected. As a result, the individuals gather at the smallest resource that can host the whole group, hence reducing competition and exploitation costs while fulfilling the overall group's needs. Our analysis reveals that the group becomes better at discriminating between similar resources as it grows in size. Also, the discrimination mechanism is flexible and the group readily switches to a better suited resource as it appears in the environment. The collective decision emerges through the self-organization of individuals, that is, in absence of any centralized control. It also requires a minimal individual cognitive investment, making the proposed mechanism likely to occur in other social species and suitable for the development of distributed decision making tools.

The article can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0019888

During swarm robotics meetings, one can encounter computer scientists, mathematicians, roboticists or engineers. But it is less common to find a biologist in such events. Yet, swarm robotics has largely developed from biological discoveries that have been made during the last thirty years about the organization of animal societies. One reason that explains the defection of biologists is the difficulty they have to find relevant information for their own work in this new research field. They consider robots as "cool" gadgets, but not as tools able to make progress in the study of social behaviors.

In this seminar, I will review some of the ways swarm robotics can contribute to the study of collective animal behavior. I argue that robotics and affiliated disciplines can bring significant improvements in this biological field, from a technical, conceptual and pedagogical point of view. I will build my discussion on top of five observations I have made while collaborating as a biologist with computer scientists and roboticists: robots require a complete specification; robots are physical entities; robots implement new technologies; robots can be inadvertent sources of biological inspiration; and robots are indeed "cool" gadgets."

More information about the location of the lecture can be found here: http://www.stevens.edu/ses/about_soe/events/rss/index.php.

Call for papers is available here along with a summary of the objectives of this workshop. In short, 

This half-day workshop aims to bring together new theories and methodologies inspired by biological principles for self-organizing robotic systems. The emphasis of the workshop is on bridging multi-disciplinary research areas such as robotics, artificial life, systems biology, and evolutionary computation. Topics of this workshop include, but are not limited to:

• Morphogenetic approaches to self-organizing multi-robot systems
• Morphogenetic approaches to modular robots
• Evolutionary and developmental approaches to design of robot body-plan and controller
• Self-organized multi-robot pattern formation and boundary coverage
• Stigmergy in self-organized collective construction
• Swarm intelligence based approaches to multi-robot systems
• Unified approaches to self-assembling swarm and modular robots
• Evolutionary multi-robot organism
• Robustness, self-reparability and evolvability of self-organizing multi-robot systems

Important dates to remember are:

• Submission deadline: February 25, 2010
• Author notification: March 6, 2010
• Final version due: March 12, 2010
• Workshop: May 3, 2010

By the way, I'm giving a talk there.