Regensburg 2022 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 14: Active Matter 3 (joint session BP/CPP/DY)

BP 14.2: Talk

Wednesday, September 7, 2022, 09:45–10:00, H16

Collective response of microrobotic swarms to external threats — •Chun-Jen Chen¹ and Clemens Bechinger^{1, 2} — ¹Fachbereich Physik, Universität Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany — ²Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behaviour, Universität Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany

Many animal species organize within groups to achieve advantages compared to being isolated. Such advantages can be found e.g. in collective responses which are less prone to individual failures or noise and thus provide better group performance. Inspired by social animals, here we demonstrate with a swarm of microrobots made from programmable active colloidal particles (APs) that their escape from a hazardous area can originate from a cooperative group formation. As a consequence, the escape efficiency remains almost unchanged even when half of the APs are not responding to the threat. Our results not only confirm that incomplete or missing individual information in robotic swarms can be compensated by other group members but also suggest strategies to increase the responsiveness and fault-tolerance of robotic swarms when performing tasks in complex environments.