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The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective
Swarming or collective motion is ubiquitous in natural systems, and instrumental in many technological applications. Accordingly, research interest in this phenomenon is crossing discipline boundaries. A common major question is that of the intricate interactions between the individual, the group, a...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Frontiers Media S.A.
2023
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Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10375296/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37520677 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1215085 |
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author | Ayali, Amir Kaminka, Gal A. |
author_facet | Ayali, Amir Kaminka, Gal A. |
author_sort | Ayali, Amir |
collection | PubMed |
description | Swarming or collective motion is ubiquitous in natural systems, and instrumental in many technological applications. Accordingly, research interest in this phenomenon is crossing discipline boundaries. A common major question is that of the intricate interactions between the individual, the group, and the environment. There are, however, major gaps in our understanding of swarming systems, very often due to the theoretical difficulty of relating embodied properties to the physical agents—individual animals or robots. Recently, there has been much progress in exploiting the complementary nature of the two disciplines: biology and robotics. This, unfortunately, is still uncommon in swarm research. Specifically, there are very few examples of joint research programs that investigate multiple biological and synthetic agents concomitantly. Here we present a novel research tool, enabling a unique, tightly integrated, bio-inspired, and robot-assisted study of major questions in swarm collective motion. Utilizing a quintessential model of collective behavior—locust nymphs and our recently developed Nymbots (locust-inspired robots)—we focus on fundamental questions and gaps in the scientific understanding of swarms, providing novel interdisciplinary insights and sharing ideas disciplines. The Nymbot-Locust bio-hybrid swarm enables the investigation of biology hypotheses that would be otherwise difficult, or even impossible to test, and to discover technological insights that might otherwise remain hidden from view. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-10375296 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2023 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-103752962023-07-29 The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective Ayali, Amir Kaminka, Gal A. Front Neurorobot Neuroscience Swarming or collective motion is ubiquitous in natural systems, and instrumental in many technological applications. Accordingly, research interest in this phenomenon is crossing discipline boundaries. A common major question is that of the intricate interactions between the individual, the group, and the environment. There are, however, major gaps in our understanding of swarming systems, very often due to the theoretical difficulty of relating embodied properties to the physical agents—individual animals or robots. Recently, there has been much progress in exploiting the complementary nature of the two disciplines: biology and robotics. This, unfortunately, is still uncommon in swarm research. Specifically, there are very few examples of joint research programs that investigate multiple biological and synthetic agents concomitantly. Here we present a novel research tool, enabling a unique, tightly integrated, bio-inspired, and robot-assisted study of major questions in swarm collective motion. Utilizing a quintessential model of collective behavior—locust nymphs and our recently developed Nymbots (locust-inspired robots)—we focus on fundamental questions and gaps in the scientific understanding of swarms, providing novel interdisciplinary insights and sharing ideas disciplines. The Nymbot-Locust bio-hybrid swarm enables the investigation of biology hypotheses that would be otherwise difficult, or even impossible to test, and to discover technological insights that might otherwise remain hidden from view. Frontiers Media S.A. 2023-07-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10375296/ /pubmed/37520677 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1215085 Text en Copyright © 2023 Ayali and Kaminka. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Ayali, Amir Kaminka, Gal A. The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
title | The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
title_full | The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
title_fullStr | The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
title_full_unstemmed | The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
title_short | The hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
title_sort | hybrid bio-robotic swarm as a powerful tool for collective motion research: a perspective |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10375296/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37520677 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2023.1215085 |
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