Title: Robotic Active Matter

Speaker: Prof. Nitin Kumar, Department of Physics, IIT Bombay

Abstract:  Active matter refers to systems driven out of equilibrium through the uptake and dissipation of energy at the level of individual constituents. As a result, they display anomalous features that closely resemble numerous biological and natural phenomena, such as flocking animals and collective cell migration. Yet, a detailed understanding of these systems remains an open challenge. Over the past few decades, experimentalists have developed various systems to explore the physical principles governing active matter. However, these systems are often very different from each other, thus, limiting the scope of drawing systematic comparisons between them. In this talk, I will present a novel robotic active matter system developed in our lab. It consists of a collection of centimeters-long programmable self-propelled robots to mimic various active matter systems. The robots have hardware components like IR sensors and light intensity sensors that enable them to detect obstacles and react to external optical signals. As an initial step, at a single robot level, we have successfully programmed it to exhibit various scalar active particle models with an excellent agreement with theoretical models. In addition to revealing rich physics, these experiments offer potential applications for bio-inspired and nature-inspired robotics.