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
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.…
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…
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)…
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…