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swarm
AURA Foresight Reaches Global XPRIZE Wildfire Finals in Alaska
Sabine Hauert
19 Jun 2026
One of only four teams remaining from more than 130 competitors worldwide, our team AURA Foresight is developing autonomous technology to stop wildfires before they grow out of control.
AURA Foresi...
Smart ‘Joey’ bots could soon swarm underground to clean and inspect our pipes
Frontiers Journals & Blog
06 Jan 2023
Researchers from the University of Leeds have developed the first mini-robot, called Joey, that can find its own way independently through networks of narrow pipes underground, to inspect any damage or leaks.
Flocks of assembler robots show potential for making larger structures
MIT News
25 Nov 2022
Researchers make progress toward groups of robots that could build almost anything, including buildings, vehicles, and even bigger robots.
Cooperative cargo transportation by a swarm of molecular machines
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
23 Jul 2022
Researchers showed it is possible to collectively transport molecular cargo by a swarm of artificial molecular robots responding to light.
Emergency-response drones to save lives in the digital skies
Horizon Magazine
20 Jul 2022
Uncrewed aircraft responding to fire and medical emergencies will be used to save lives - if digitalised air-traffic control can help them navigate safely in the skies over Europe.
Radhika Nagpal at #NeurIPS2021: the collective intelligence of army ants
Lucy Smith
01 Feb 2022
Radhika’s research focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching goal being to understand how large groups of individuals, with local interaction rules, can cooperate to achieve globally complex behaviour.
Sniffy Bug: a fully autonomous swarm of gas-seeking nano quadcopters in cluttered environments
Bart Duisterhof and Guido de Croon
15 Jul 2021
Tiny drones are ideal candidates for fully autonomous jobs that are too dangerous or time-consuming for humans. A commonly shared dream by engineers and fire & rescue services, would be to have swarms...
Robot Swarms in the Real World workshop at IEEE ICRA 2021
Daniel Carrillo-Zapata
17 Jun 2021
Siddharth Mayya (University of Pennsylvania), Gennaro Notomista (CNRS Rennes), Roderich Gross (The University of Sheffield) and Vijay Kumar (University of Pennsylvania) were the organisers of this IEE...
Creating expressive robot swarms
Merihan Alhafnawi
23 May 2021
As robot swarms leave the lab and enter our daily lives, it is important that we find ways by which we can effectively communicate with robot swarms, especially ones that contain a high number of robo...
Helping drone swarms avoid obstacles without hitting each other
EPFL
20 May 2021
By Clara Marc
There is strength in numbers. That’s true not only for humans, but for drones too. By flying in a swarm, they can cover larger areas and collect a wider range of data, since each dr...
Towards mapping unknown environments with a robot swarm
Mapping is an essential task in many robotics applications. A map is a representation of the environment generated from robots positions and sensors data. A map can be either used to navigate the robo...
ep.
331
podcast
Multi-Robot Learning, with Amanda Prorok
Lilly Clark
29 Mar 2021
Robohub Podcast · Multi-Robot Learning
In this episode, Lilly interviews Amanda Prorok, Professor of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. Prorok discusses her research o...
Robotic swarm swims like a school of fish
Wyss Institute
01 Feb 2021
By Leah Burrows / SEAS Communications
Schools of fish exhibit complex, synchronized behaviors that help them find food, migrate, and evade predators. No one fish or sub-group of fish coordinates th...
ep.
326
podcast
Deep Sea Mining, with Benjamin Pietro Filardo
Abate De Mey
18 Jan 2021
Robohub Podcast · Deep Sea Mining
In this episode, Abate follows up with Benjamin Pietro Filardo, founder of Pliant Energy Systems and NACROM, the North American Consortium for Responsible Ocean M...
Robot swarms follow instructions to create art
Frontiers Journals & Blog
18 Oct 2020
By Conn Hastings, science writer
Controlling a swarm of robots to paint a picture sounds like a difficult task. However, a new technique allows an artist to do just that, without worrying about pro...
ep.
305
podcast
Coordination, Cooperation, and Collaboration, with Vijay Kumar
Lilly Clark
01 Mar 2020
In this interview, Lilly interviews Vijay Kumar, Professor and Dean at the University of Pennsylvania. He discusses coordination, cooperation, and collaboration in multi-robot systems. He also explain...
ep.
268
podcast
Robotarium: A Robotics Lab Accessible to All, with Magnus Egerstedt
Audrow Nash
02 Sep 2018
In this episode, Audrow Nash interview Magnus Egerstedt, Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about a way for anyone interested in swarm robotics to test their ideas on hardware, called...
Indoor drone shows are here
Markus Waibel
09 Jan 2018
2017 was the year where indoor drone shows came into their own. Verity Studios' Lucie drones alone completed more than 20,000 autonomous flights. A Synthetic Swarm of 99 Lucie micro drones started t...
ep.
246
podcast
Smart Swarms, with Vijay Kumar
Jack Rasiel
28 Oct 2017
In this episode, Jack Rasiel interviews Vijay Kumar, Professor and Dean of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Kumar discusses the guiding ideas behind his research on micro unmanned aeri...
Micro drones swarm above Metallica
Markus Waibel
04 Sep 2017
Metallica’s European WorldWired tour, which opened to an ecstatic crowd of 15,000 in Copenhagen's sold-out Royal Arena this Saturday, features a swarm of micro drones flying above the band. Shortly...
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 7/10/17
The U.S. Army is developing a drone that moves like a flying squirrel. Credit: David McNally/U.S. Army
News
A U.S. drone strike in Somalia targeted members of al-Shabab. It is the second drone...
The Robotarium: A remotely accessible swarm robotics research testbed
Daniel Pickem, Paul Glotfelter, Li Wang, Mark Mote, Aaron D. Ames, Eric Feron and Magnus Egerstedt
29 Jun 2017
When developing algorithms for coordinating the behaviors of swarms of robots it is crucial that the algorithms are actually deployed and tested on real hardware platforms. Unfortunately, building and...
Cooperative payload transportation with UAVs
Julian Estevez
27 Apr 2017
Delivery robots are touted as gaining widespread popularity in the near future. Wheeled models could be suitable for urban areas, while UAVs have great potential in accessing difficult areas and carr...
Robot Life Survey
What might the first western explorer have thought upon encountering whales, flamingos and iguanas? What would have they thought of these strange near-fantastical creatures?
What is it like for 21s...
The Drone Center’s Weekly Roundup: 01/09/17
January 2, 2017 – January 8, 2017
At the Center for the Study of the Drone
We are delighted to announce that we are collaborating with the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan on ...
Designing robots with bugs??
Jibo
26 Dec 2016
Ask a child to design a robot, and they’ll produce a drawing that looks a little like you or I—the parts may be gray and boxy, but it will have two arms, two legs, and a head (probably with an ant...
Robohub roundtable: Robotic bee swarms from Black Mirror – what’s hype, what’s real?
Alex Kirkpatrick
06 Dec 2016
In this roundtable edition, we watched the Black Mirror episode “Hated in the Nation” and asked our Robohub team members: with many institutions focused on developing aerial drone technology, and ...
How can swarm roboticists contribute to and benefit from the wisdom of other disciplines?
Chih-Chun Chen and Nathan Crilly
08 Nov 2016
What can swarm roboticists learn from policy makers, systems biologists and physicists, and vice versa? It is already widely recognised that Robotics is an inherently interdisciplinary field and that ...
mROBerTO: The modular millirobot for swarm behavior studies
Justin Kim
26 Oct 2016
Developed by a team at the University of Toronto, mROBerTO (milli-ROBot TORonto) is designed for swarm-robotics researchers who might wish to test their collective-behavior algorithms with real physic...
Swarms of precision agriculture robots could help put food on the table
Swarms of drones will help farmers map weeds in their fields and improve crop yields. This is the promise of an ECHORD++ funded research project called ‘SAGA: Swarm Robotics for Agricultural Appli...
Machines can learn by simply observing, without being told what to look for
Roderich Gross
15 Sep 2016
We have developed a new machine learning method at the University of Sheffield called Turing Learning that allows machines to model natural or artificial systems....
Fish and ships: artificial lily pads and mussels monitor Europe’s waters
Horizon Magazine
16 May 2016
by Fintan Burke
Europe’s waters have never been busier. Between fishing boats, tourist cruisers, and underwater turbines, marine habitats around the continent have never before needed a more watc...
Raffaello D’Andrea at TED2016: Novel flying machines and swarms of tiny flying robots
Robohub Editors
22 Feb 2016
Last week Raffaello D'Andrea, professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and founder of Verity Studios, demonstrated a whole series of novel flying machines live on stage at T...
The Year of CoCoRo Video #52/52: Final Demonstration
Thomas Schmickl
05 Jan 2016
In our final video we demonstrate the entire CoCoRo system communicating and interacting together, including: the base station, a "relay-chain" swarm, and a search swarm on the ground....
The Year of CoCoRo Video #51/52: Big Vision
Thomas Schmickl
22 Dec 2015
Our penultimate video features the initial "Big Vision" trailer we produced at the beginning of this project. The video showcases the basic components of the robotic system we targeted (surface st...
Scaling up underwater swarmbot research from tabletop ‘aquarium’ to the Venice Lagoon (CoCoRo Video #50/52)
Thomas Schmickl
15 Dec 2015
Our underwater swarm research started in a few cubic centimeters of water with some naked electronics on a table. Over the next three and a half years, our swarm increased by a factor of 40, and ...
