Abstract: Super-organisms solve complex physiological problems collectively, sans plan or planner, on scales much larger than the individual. Motivated by observations in the field and in the lab, I will describe how different orders of social insects - termites, bees and ants - actively regulate their micro-environment by constructing and deconstructing complex functional architectures. By linking physics and behavior on multiple scales using local sensing and action mediated by global fields, these examples point to a kind of embodied intelligence. To synthesize these complex collective behaviors in-vitro, I will close by describing our experiments using simple robots that sharpen some questions raised a long time ago by Tinbergen, Turing and others.
Speaker
L. MahadevanProfessor at Harvard University