Harvard engineers built ant-like robots that work together without central control
Ants do not need a foreman to raise a city. Working with little more than local cues, they excavate tunnels, pile up soil, and shape nests that can regulate airflow and temperature. That kind of collective competence has long fascinated scientists, partly because no single ant appears to understand the whole project. The intelligence seems to sit somewhere between the insects and the place they are changing. Now a team at Harvard has built a robotic version of that idea. Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences developed small cooperative robots that can organize themselves to either build structures or dismantle them, using only simple rules and changes in their surroundings. The work, published in PRX Life, was led by L. Mahadevan, whose lab has spent years studying how physical processes shape living systems, from insect colonies to folds in the brain and gut. “Our new study shows how simple, local rules can lead to the emergence of complex task completion that …
