Hamid Kellay (Laboratoire Ondes et Matières d'Aquitaine, CNRS et Université de Bordeaux). How to force an army of self-propelled mindless robots to act collectively?

I will present a study of assemblies of rodlike robots made motile through self-vibration. When confined in circular arenas, dilute assemblies of these rods act as a 2D gas of particles. But above a critical surface fraction, some fraction of the bots line up in one or more tight clusters along the corral boundary while, in the bulk, gas-like behavior is retained. I will show that the unified pushing of the clustered bots on the boundary can drive collective motion: for corrals that are deformable but free to move, surface cluster formation forces the robot army to work together. The deformability of the arena allows the assembly to go through narrow slits or to circumvent obstacles.