Physicomimetics

Standard approaches to understanding swarms relyon inspiration from biology and are generally coveredby the term "biomimetics". This book focuses on adifferent, complementary inspiration, namely physics.The editors have introduced the term 'physicomimetics'to refer to physics-based swarm approaches, which offertwo advantages. First, they capture the notion that"nature is lazy', meaning that physics-based systems alwaysperform the minimal amount of work necessary, which is an especially important advantage in swarm robotics.Second, physics is the most predictive science, and can reduce complex systems to simple concepts and equationsthat codify emergent behavior and help us to design and understand swarms. The editors consolidated over a decade of work on swarm intelligence and swarm robotics, organizing the book into19 chapters as follows. Part I introduces the concept ofswarms and offers the reader a physics tutorial; Part IIdeals with applications of physicomimetics, in order ofincreased complexity; Part III examines the hardwarerequirements of the presented algorithms and demonstrates real robot implementations; Part IV demonstrates how thetheory can be used to design swarms from first principlesand provides a novel algorithm that handles changingenvironments; finally, Part V shows that physicomimeticscan be used for function optimization, moving the readerfrom issues of swarm robotics to swarm intelligence. Thetext is supported with a downloadable package containingsimulation code and videos of working robots. This book is suitable for talented high school and undergraduate students, as well as researchers andgraduate students in the areas of artificial intelligenceand robotics.