From Social Insects to Robots: Designing with Collective Embodied Intelligence

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. Mound-building termites, for instance, are believed to use their own body as a template for construction; the resulting dirt mound serves, among other things, to regulate volatile pheromone cues which in turn guide further construction and colony growth. Throughout this talk I 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. I will exemplify the strength and challenges of this approach through our studies of social insects, design of soft and entangled robot collectives, collective robotic construction crews, and micro-scale robot swarms.

Kirstin Petersen is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, where she is the Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow and a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow. Her lab, the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, is focused on design and coordination of robot collectives able to achieve complex behaviors beyond the reach of an individual, and corresponding studies on how social insects do so in nature. Major research topics include swarm intelligence, embodied intelligence, soft robots, bio-hybrid systems, and robots for environmental monitoring and remediation.
Petersen completed her PhD at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Her doctoral research was featured on the cover of Science. She was named one of RoboHub's 25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know (2018), received a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering (2019), the NSF CAREER Award (2021), the Cornell College of Engineering Excellence in Research Award (2021), the Douglas Whitney '61 Excellence in Teaching Award (2022), and was elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2024 and Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow in 2025.