Ant and Honeybee Colonies as Inspiration for Robotic Swarms

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in developing coordinated swarms of hundreds to thousands of robots for tasks including environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue, exploration, and construction.  Social insects serve as a rich source of inspiration both for the design of robots and the programs that produce desired collective behaviors.  In this talk, I will discuss the ongoing development of flapping-wing microrobotic bees and an approach to controlling the swarm for crop pollination.  I will also present studies of group food retrieval by Aphaenogaster cockerelli ants and models of this behavior as strategies for load transport by robot teams.