Several animal species self-organize into large groups to leverage vital behaviors such as foraging, construc- tion, or predator evasion. With the advancement of robotics and automation, engineered multi-agent systems have been inspired to achieve similarly high degrees of scalable, robust, and adaptable autonomy through decentralized and dynamic coordination. So far however, they have been most successfully demonstrated above ground or with partial assistance from central controllers and external tracking. Here we demonstrate an underwater robot collective that realizes full spatiotempo- ral coordination. Using the example of fish-inspired evasive maneuvers, our robots display alignment, formation control, and coordinated escape, enabled by real-time on-board multi- robot tracking and local decision making. Accompanied by a custom simulator, this robotic platform advances the physically- validated development of algorithms for collective behaviors and future applications including collective exploration, track- ing and capture, or environmental sampling.

Fish benefit energetically when swimming in groups, which is reflected in lower tail-beat frequencies for maintaining a given speed. Recent studies further show that fish save the most energy when swimming behind their neighbor such that both the leader and the follower benefit. However, the mechanisms underlying such hydrodynamic advantages have thus far not been established conclusively. The long-standing drafting hypothesis—reduction of drag forces by judicious positioning in regions of reduced oncoming flow–fails to explain advantages of in-line schooling described in this work. We present an alternate hypothesis for the hydrodynamic benefits of in-line swimming based on enhancement of propulsive thrust. Specifically, we show that an idealized school consisting of in-line pitching foils gains hydrodynamic benefits via two mechanisms that are rooted in the undulatory jet leaving the leading foil and impinging on the trailing foil: (i) leading-edge suction on the trailer foil, and (ii) added-mass push on the leader foil. Our results demonstrate that the savings in power can reach as high as 70% for a school swimming in a compact arrangement. Informed by these findings, we designed a modification of the tail propulsor that yielded power savings of up to 56% in a self-propelled autonomous swimming robot. Our findings provide insights into hydrodynamic advantages of fish schooling, and also enable bioinspired designs for significantly more efficient propulsion systems that can harvest some of their energy left in the flow.

Termite colonies construct towering, complex mounds, in a classic example of distributed agents coordinating their activity via interaction with a shared environment. The traditional explanation for how this coordination occurs focuses on the idea of a ‘cement pheromone’, a chemical signal left with deposited soil that triggers further deposition. Recent research has called this idea into question, pointing to a more complicated behavioural response to cues perceived with multiple senses. In this work, we explored the role of topological cues in affecting early construction activity in Macrotermes. We created artificial surfaces with a known range of curvatures, coated them with nest soil, placed groups of major workers on them and evaluated soil displacement as a function of location at the end of 1 h. Each point on the surface has a given curvature, inclination and absolute height; to disambiguate these factors, we conducted experiments with the surface in different orientations. Soil displacement activity is consistently correlated with surface curvature, and not with inclination nor height. Early exploration activity is also correlated with curvature, to a lesser degree. Topographical cues provide a long-term physical memory of building activity in a manner that ephemeral pheromone labelling cannot. Elucidating the roles of these and other cues for group coordination may help provide organizing principles for swarm robotics and other artificial systems.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Liquid brains, solid brains: How distributed cognitive architectures process information’.

Turing Learning is a promising evolutionary design method for swarm robotics that uses ob- servation of natural or artificial systems to infer controllers for agents in a swarm. However, Tur- ing Learning has thus far only been used to infer very simple swarm behaviors. In this work, we expand Turing Learning to infer dispersion, a much more complex swarm behavior, by a simulated school of robotic fish. Turing Learning depends on the co-evolution of replicas and classifiers. Replicas mimic ideal behavior and classifiers distinguish between data samples from replica and ideal agents. We model replicas and classifiers with neural networks and investigate the architecture of each component independently in order to determine needed modifications to Turing Learning for it to infer fish schooling. We find that previously formulated data samples led to the inference of behaviors that locally mimicked the agent trajectories in dispersion, yet poorly mimicked dispersion of an entire swarm. We present three alternative data samples that consider the spatial arrangement of agents in a swarm. We also introduce three new classifier fitness func- tions that accelerate evolution of high-accuracy classifiers. We find in a preliminary trial that using one of our data samples (metrics) and classifier fitness functions (foutputs) enables the successful inference of dispersion via Turing Learning.