Thanks to a post on Leslie Marsh’ blog, I discovered this BBC article that summarises some of the swarm robotics demos that were on show at the Alife XI conference this week. The article is accompanied by a small video where small autonomous robots divide up tasks in a full decentralized manner (I can’t show [...]

Thanks to this article in the Discover Magazine I found this small video on Slatev.com where the basics of pheromone recruitment in ants are explained and where their potential applications in car traffic management are introduced.

As indicated in their name, leaf-cutter ants cut tree leaves and bring the pieces to their nest where they are used as substrate to grow mushrooms. Usually, when the path toward the nest is clean, these pieces of leaf are large. But when the path is obstructed by twigs for instance under which ants have [...]

[ October 19, 2008 to October 24, 2008. ] Du 19 au 24 octobre prochain, le Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale (CNRS-URM 5169) et l’Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse (CNRS-UMR 5219) de l’Université Paul Sabatier à Toulouse organisent la première “Ecole d’Automne interdisciplinaire de Biologie Systémique”. Pour cette première édition, le thème abordé sera l’analyse et la modélisation des déplacements individuels et [...]

[ September 21, 2008 to September 23, 2008. ] The IEEE Swarm Intelligence Symposium 2008 will held this year in Saint Louis (Missouri, USA) from September 21 to 23. The call for paper has been recently published and can be downloaded here. They invite authors to submit original and unpublished work related to swarm intelligence, including research, theory, development, and applications. Areas of focus [...]

[ April 14, 2008 8:00 am to April 17, 2008 8:00 pm. ] Du 14 au 17 avril prochain auront lieu à Toulouse les 4èmes rencontres “Ecologie et Comportement”. Ces rencontres organisée par et pour les doctorants et post-doctorants entrent dans le cadre général de l’écologie comportementale, discipline au carrefour de l’étude du comportement animal (l’éthologie), de l’écologie et de la biologie évolutive. Le colloque sera accueilli à [...]

Alex Wild is among the most talented insect photographers that can be found by browsing the web. His two web galleries (myrmecos.net and alexanderwild.com) display some of the most beautiful photographs of ants I ever seen (as the one above which is the banner of his blog). He recently published on his blog (the Myrmecos [...]

I recently found an interesting interview of Iain Couzin on Edge.org. Iain Couzin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. His research focuses on understanding collective behaviours. In particular he is interested in how large-scale biological patterns result from the actions and interactions of the individual components of [...]

Scientific American has just published a special edition about robotics. It gathers many interesting articles about most of the current hot topics in robotics. Among them is a new version of “Swarm Smarts“, an article written by Eric Bonabeau and Guy Theraulaz in 2000 for the same journal, where the approach of swarm intelligence is [...]

I recently read the following post by Zyxo on Mixotricha blog about complexity which illustrates one fundamental flaw in many studies of swarm intelligence: the assumption that the subunits in a swarm-intelligent system are necessarily dumb.

Interesting post from Ryan Hollingsworth as guest blogger for LeRon Shults about swarm intelligence. At the end he poses the [...]