Motivation

The motivation for studying collective behavior is to emulate the remarkable efficiency of natural swarms. Across all scales, from schools of fish to colonies of cells, these collectives use reconfiguration and coordinated movement to perform complex tasks. While the goal is to create artificial versions, current approaches face limitations: macroscale robotic swarms are often too complex to scale, while microscale systems require external fields for control. Therefore, this work seeks to develop self-driven systems that can achieve complex functions using only simple materials, mirroring the efficiency seen in nature.