NAGPAL LAB

Welcome to the SSR Lab!

In nature, groups of thousands of individuals cooperate to create complex structure purely through local interactions -- cells, ants, bees, fish. Even though each individual has limited ability, as a collective they achieve tremendous complexity. What would it take to create our own artificial collectives of the scale and complexity that nature achieves? Our group is interested in understanding and engineering self-organizing systems, where large numbers of relatively simple agents cooperate to produce complex collective behavior. We design novel bio-inspired robots and swarm algorithms, focusing on the combination of embodied intelligence and collective intelligence. We study self-organization in nature, in collaboration with biologists. We explore applications to environment, space, architecture, and culture. Our interdisciplinary work spans Robotics, AI, Biology, and more. To learn more about our work, check out out the Research and Publications pages. To learn about our team and how to join us, see the People page.

Lab News

Beyond Planar (Ko et al, Scientific Reports)

July 2025: Our new paper on 3D fish schools is here! (Open Access!). Led by Dr. Hungtang Ko in collaboration with Harvard, long-duration recordings show that fish schools are highly dynamic, always 3D, and exhibit mini structures like “ladder” formations.

Congrats to SSR Graduating Seniors!

May 2025: Congrats to Joachim Ambaw, Jad Bendarkawi, Sabrina Nicacio, Brian Mmari, Frida Ruiz, Simon Gotera & Kalu Obasi. Special Congrats to Sabrina Nicacio who is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and headed to Stanford! It was wonderful seeing current seniors and SSR alum at this year's graduation and…

DARS 2024 Conference

Oct 2024, DARS 2024: One Keynote, One Award, Two Papers, and a Demo! The SSR group had a terrific time at the Distributed Autonomous Robots conference (DARs) held at Cornell Tech. Congrats to Sneha, Di, and Hungtang for their papers on Self-organized Strategic Sacrifice (Finalist for Best Paper Award)…

The Swarm Garden @ Lewis Art Complex, CoLab

Apr 9, 2024: The Swarm Garden exhibit was a huge success!  Over a 100 visitors experienced firsthand the blend of art + engineering, witnessing how dynamic “living-like” spaces promote health and happiness. Not to…

Recent Publications

2025

1.
Ko H, Girma A, Zhang Y, Pan Y, Lauder G, Nagpal R. Beyond planar: fish schools adopt ladder formations in 3D (Open Access). Scientific Reports [Internet]. 2025;. Available from: Open Access Link: Beyond planar: fish schools adopt ladder formations in 3D (Open Access)

2024

1.
Chiu D, Nagpal R, Haghighat B. Optimization and Evaluation of a Multi Robot Surface Inspection Task Through Particle Swarm Optimization. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 2024.
1.
Ni D, Ko H, Nagpal R. Leader-Follower 3D Formation for Underwater Robots. In: 17th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS’24). New York, USA; 2024.
1.
Ramshanker S, Ko H, Nagpal R. Strategic Sacrifice: Self-Organized Robot Swarm Localization for Inspection Productivity. In: 17th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS’24) (BEST PAPER FINALIST). New York, USA; 2024.