Robot swarms learn teamwork from birds and fish: Know all about this nature-inspired trick

Many of the most exciting discoveries in science and technology come from nature itself. Be it airplanes modeled after birds, to Velcro inspired by burrs sticking to clothes, scientists have always looked to the natural world for clever solutions. It looks like evolution has already solved many problems.

Another arena of tech where science seems to have been recently inspired by nature is robotics, especially in how groups of robots can work together like flocks of birds or schools of fish.


A simple rule with big effects


In a recent study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at institutions such as Radboud University and New York University introduced a framework to improve how robot swarms coordinate themselves. The most important aspect is based upon geometric design rules tied to a new intrinsic property called “curvity.”

What is curvity ?
Curvity is a signed parameter, meaning it can be positive or negative, with units of curvature. It’s derived from first principles and symbolises how much a robot tends to curve under an external force. If curvity is positive vs negative, the robot will respond differently in how it moves relative to others.

How it works in swarms
Using just this one rule, the robots either attracted or repelled each other, and that alone was enough to create bigger group behaviour.
In simple tests with two robots, they behaved just as expected based on their curvity. When researchers ran the same rules on thousands of robots, the whole swarm still moved in predictable ways, either clustering together, flowing as a group, or forming looser patterns, just based on their curvity settings.




This mechanism can be used for real-world applications
“One of the great challenges of designing robotic swarms is finding a decentralized control mechanism,” explains Matan Yah Ben Zion, an assistant professor at the Donders Center for Cognition at the Netherlands’ Radboud University and one of the authors of the paper, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Fish, bees, and birds do this very well—they form magnificent structures and function without a singular leader or a directive. By contrast, synthetic swarms are nowhere near as agile, and controlling them for large-scale purposes is not yet possible.”


What makes this idea really useful is that it’s based on basic geometry and mechanics, not complicated code. That means it’s much easier to build into real robots—whether they’re industrial machines, delivery bots, or even tiny medical robots designed to travel inside the human body.