Biologically-inspired Robot Swarms

RADHIKA NAGPAL — COMPUTER SCIENTIST, WYSS INSTITUTE FOR BIOLOGICALLY INSPIRED ENGINEERING AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

If Harvard researcher Radhika Nagpal has her way, thousands of tiny robots will soon work together cleaning up chemical spills, building dams and inspecting bridges. “We are really on the cusp of a revolution in robotics,” she says.

Nagpal and her team create robots that mimic real-life organisms, self-organizing and collaborating to complete complex tasks beyond what any individual robot can do. Their role, as she sees it, is to free up humans from “the 3Ds:” tasks that are dirty, dull or dangerous.

Her team’s first project was inspired by termites. A thousand-robot army, the Kilobots, are now being used in labs around the world for research and education. In 2021, her lab built underwater robots, the Blueswarm, that act like a school of fish, complete with intricate migration patterns and predator-evasion tactics, for monitoring damage to coral reefs. Because there’s no Wifi or GPS underwater, these deep-sea explorers mimic the bioluminescence of living sea creatures to communicate with one another. The next commercial project, Nagpal thinks, will be aerial swarms that can inspect crops and deliver packages. When the military adopts swarm technology, it could change the nature of conflict. “As we go forward into the future and these systems are deployed,” she says, “we are going to learn lots of new lessons of what that means.” —Meghan gunn