From Social Insects to Robots: Harnessing Collective Embodied Intelligence
Natural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evolutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals, it hinges on their morphology, their physical interactions, and the way they shape and leverage their environment. Mound-building termites, for instance, are believed to use their own body as a template for construction; the resulting dirt mound serves, among other things, to regulate volatile pheromone cues which in turn guide further construction and colony growth. Throughout this talk I will argue how we can leverage the same principles to achieve greater performance in robot collectives, by paying attention to the interplay between control and hardware, as well as direct- and environmentally mediated coordination between robots. I will exemplify the strengths and challenges of this approach through soft and amorphous robot collectives, collective robotic construction, and micro-scale robot collectives.
Bio: Kirstin Petersen is an associate professor and Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Her lab, the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, is focused on design and coordination of robot collectives able to achieve complex behaviors beyond the reach of an individual, and corresponding studies on how social insects do so in nature. Major research topics include swarm intelligence, embodied intelligence, soft robots, and bio-hybrid systems. Petersen did her postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and her Ph.D. at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Her graduate work was featured in and on the cover of Science, she was elected among the top 25 women to know in robotics by Robohub in 2018, received the Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering in 2019, the NSF CAREER Award and the Cornell Engineering Excellence in Research Award in 2021, the Douglas Whitney ’61 Excellence in Teaching Award in Cornell Engineering in 2022, and was elevated to IEEE senior member in 2024.