Bioinspired Behaviors and Control Strategies Empowering Swarm Intelligent Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Nature offers several examples of complex systems with social behaviors. Ants, honeybees, wasps, fishes, birds, and even plants more recently, have inspired control and optimization algorithms in artificial contexts, including in logistics, transportation, telecommuncations, and robotics.

Swarm intelligence is deeply grounded in biomimetic and bioinspired models of self-organization featuring the emergence of complex behaviors such as collective foraging, co-operative construction, co-ordinated exploration, and colonization of an area, with no need for a central elaboration but relying instead on distributed control and individual decision-making strategies. Nature implements these strategies in a variety of ways, including multi-agent systems with different complexity levels of signal processing or into individuals through the distribution and embodiment of "simple" responses into the system's skin or tissue, which are functionalized through proper design, mechanical properties, and reactive behaviors to physical/chemical signals converging into high-level system behavior. Individuals of such complex systems can have homogeneous or heterogeneous chararcetristics and show extremely simple to articulated and intelligent individual behaviors.

Industrial, agricultaral, domotic, and other fields of applications need more and more prompt, reliable, and fault-tolerant implementations to be effective in dynamic environments.   

This Special Issue aims to collect the latest results at the boundary between control theory and swarm intelligence and to discuss to what extent the bioinspired appraoch can offer favorable impacts through effective applications of swarm intelligence and foster new thoughts about novel paradigms, research directions, and innovative solutions in swarm robotics. To this end, we encourage submissions of theoretical papers, reviews, as well as experimental studies dealing with relevant questions in swarm robotics and distributed intelligence.

Dr. Emanuela Del Dottore
Dr. Michele Palladino
Guest Editors

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