Kirstin Petersen

Natural swarms, such as ants, bees, and termites, exhibit sophisticated colony level behaviors with remarkably scalable and error tolerant properties. 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. Petersen’s research explores how the same principles can be leveraged to achieve advanced autonomy in robot collectives, through hardware and software co-development, and by integrating the shared environment into the design process. Current research themes span collective robotic construction, human swarm interaction, soft robot collectives, biological swarms, and bio-hybrid collectives.