WRRC Fall 2025 Seminar

December 5, 2:00pm - 3:00pm
Mānoa Campus, https://hawaii.zoom.us/meeting/register/N_E7yMMrRNGBKI0gP2bAzw

From Nature to Robots and Back: Designing with Collective Embodied Intelligence Speaker: Dr. Kirstin Petersen Natural swarms exhibit sophisticated colony-level behaviors with remarkable scalability and error tolerance. Their evolutionary success stems from more than just intelligent individuals, it hinges on their morphology, their physical interactions, and the way they shape and leverage their environment. In coral reefs, for example, the calcium-carbonate skeleton built by many simple polyps reshapes currents and nutrient distributions around the colony. Those altered hydrodynamic and chemical conditions, in turn, steer subsequent growth and collective behavior. Throughout this talk, Dr. Petersen will argue how we can leverage the same principles to achieve greater performance in robot collectives by paying attention to the interplay between control and hardware, as well as direct- and environmentally mediated coordination between robots. She will exemplify the strength and challenges of this approach through soft and amorphous robot collectives, automation in construction and digital agriculture, and fluid-coupled micro-robots, drawing on the principles evident in natural swarms. Finally, in the spirit of exploring collaborations at Â鶹´«Ã½²ÑÄå²Ô´Ç²¹, Dr. Petersen will present a new project on using collaborative robots for microplastics removal in waterways.


Event Sponsor
Water Resources Research Center, Mānoa Campus

More Information
Diana Hirabayashi, 808-956-3096, dianahi@hawaii.edu,

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