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.

• Submission Deadline: Oct 31, 2010
• Notification Due: Dec 15, 2010
• Final Version Due: Jan 15, 2011

Secret of Annoying Crowds Revealed – From Science Now

Push, shout, or politely excuse yourself all you want, but those slowpokes in your way just won't budge. A new study shows a long-neglected reason why: Up to 70% of people in crowds socially glue themselves into groups of two or more, slowing down traffic. What's worse, as crowds gets denser, groups bend into anti-aerodynamic shapes that exacerbate the problem. The study may be a boon to urban planners.

The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics – From PLoS ONE

Human crowd motion is mainly driven by self-organized processes based on local interactions among pedestrians. While most studies of crowd behaviour consider only interactions among isolated individuals, it turns out that up to 70% of people in a crowd are actually moving in groups, such as friends, couples, or families walking together. These groups constitute medium-scale aggregated structures and their impact on crowd dynamics is still largely unknown. In this work, we analyze the motion of approximately 1500 pedestrian groups under natural condition, and show that social interactions among group members generate typical group walking patterns that influence crowd dynamics. At low density, group members tend to walk side by side, forming a line perpendicular to the walking direction. As the density increases, however, the linear walking formation is bent forward, turning it into a V-like pattern. These spatial patterns can be well described by a model based on social communication between group members. We show that the V-like walking pattern facilitates social interactions within the group, but reduces the flow because of its “non-aerodynamic” shape. Therefore, when crowd density increases, the group organization results from a trade-off between walking faster and facilitating social exchange. These insights demonstrate that crowd dynamics is not only determined by physical constraints induced by other pedestrians and the environment, but also significantly by communicative, social interactions among individuals.

The SIMAI congress will held in Cagliari (Italy), from June 21st to June 25th 2010. The exact date of the symposium during this period is not yet decided. Expected speakers are:

• José Alfredo Cañizo (Department of Mathematics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): Mean-field limit for collective behavior models with noise.
• Emiliano Cristiani (CEMSAC – Università di Salerno and IAC-CNR, Roma, Italy): A multiscale approach for pedestrian flow.
• Jesú Rosado (Department of Mathematics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain): A refined result of flocking for the Cucker-Smale model.
• Juliette Venel (Department of Mathematics, Université de Valenciennes et du Hainaut-Cambrésis, France): A discrete contact model for crowd motion.
• Fiammetta Venuti (Department of Structural and Geotechnical Engineering, Politecnico di Torino, Italy): Crowd-structure interaction on footbridges, modelling of the coupled system and an application.
• And me, Simon Garnier (Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University, USA): Trail geometry encodes heuristic information in the Argentine ant.

Hereafter is the summary of this book:

One of the greatest discoveries of recent times is that the complex patterns we find in life are often produced when all of the individuals in a group follow the same simple rule. This process of “self-organization” reveals itself in the inanimate worlds of crystals and seashells, but as Len Fisher shows, it is also evident in living organisms, from fish to ants to human beings. The coordinated movements of fish in shoals, for example, arise from the simple rule: “Follow the fish in front.” Traffic flow arises from simple rules: “Keep your distance” and “Keep to the right.”

Now, in his new book, Fisher shows how we can manage our complex social lives in an ever more chaotic world. His investigation encompasses topics ranging from “swarm intelligence” to the science of parties and the best ways to start a fad. Finally, Fisher sheds light on the beauty and utility of complexity theory. An entertaining journey into the science of everyday life, The Perfect Swarm will delight anyone who wants to understand the complex situations in which we so often find ourselves.

Review in nature can be found here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7285/full/464035a.html.

Review in Scientific American Mind can be found here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mind-reviews-the-perfect-swarm.

In the heart of Africa's savannah lies a city that is a model of sustainable development. Its buttressed towers are built entirely from natural, biodegradable materials. Its inhabitants live and work in quarters that are air-conditioned and humidity-regulated, without consuming a single watt of electricity. Water comes from wells that dip deep into the earth, and food is cultivated self-sufficiently in gardens within its walls. This metropolis is not just eco-friendly: with its curved walls and graceful arches, it is rather beautiful too.

This is no human city, of course. It is a termite mound.

To read the rest of this article, click here: For sustainable architecture, think bug – life – 22 February 2010 – New Scientist.

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. 

Swarm Cognition is the juxtaposition of two relatively unrelated concepts that evoke, on the one hand, the power of collective behaviours displayed by natural swarms, and on the other hand the complexity of cognitive processes in the vertebrate brain. In recent years, scientists from various disciplines have been suggesting that, at a certain level of description, operational principles used to account for the behaviour of natural swarms may turn out to be extremely powerful tools to identify the neuroscientic basis of cognition. Generally speaking, these studies claim that the massively parallel animal-to-animal interactions which operationally explain cognitive processes of natural swarms are functionally similar to neuron-to-neuron communication which underlie the cognitive abilities of living organisms, including humans. With this premise, research work in Swarm Cognition aims at identifying the operational principles of cognitive behaviour by calling upon the underlying mechanisms of self-organising systems, i.e., systems whose internal organisation changes without being guided by an outside source.

We encourage submissions of innovative research work which highlights the importance of the mechanisms of self-organisation as operational principles to explain cognitive processes displayed by individuals or collectives, both natural and artificial. Particularly welcome are contributions focusing on the distributed mechanisms underlying cognitive processes, like, for instance, decision-making, attention, learning or memory.
Topics of interest in relationship to the above issues include but are not limited to:

• Cognitive and computational neurosciences
• Cognitive and social ethology
• Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics
• Adaptive control
• Systems biology
• Neural computation and distributed representations
• Cultural evolution and Learning
• Cognitive sociology
• Bounded rationality

Important dates for this special issue are: 

• Manuscript due: March 15, 2010
• Notication: May 31, 2010
• Final manuscript due: July 19, 2010