MPI-DS Colloquium: From Robot Uprising to Rise of the Dead - Lessons in Engineering and Biology from Active Matter

Cooperation is vital for the survival of a swarm. No single bird is faster than a jet plane, and no single fish is faster than a speed boat — humans beat individual animals in air, land, and sea. But, when animals cooperate and swarm, they beat us since biblical times. The technological gap in engineering artificial swarms suggests a conceptual gap in our understanding of emergent behaviors in decentralized systems. Inspired by non-equilibrium statistical mechanics I will present a recent result from my group that sheds light on a hallmark of agile cooperation in nature: cooperative transport — the ability of a decentralized group to spontaneously transport a larger payload. Using Newtonian me-chanics alone I will present the minimal ingredients required for simple robots to achieve cooperative transport and derive a geometric criterion for its emergence. Interestingly, our model finds application in biomechanics, and captures geotaxis, a widespread pheno-type in the animal kingdom. I will conclude with future directions and potential extension of our approach using machine learning and artificial intelligence.