Realizing Emergent Collective Behaviors Through Robotic Swarmalators

Swarmalators move as a function of their pairwise phase interactions, and control their phase as a function of their relative position or motion to other agents. This enables dual sync and swarm behaviors that mimic those exhibited by diverse natural and artificial swarms; these behaviors have almost entirely been explored only through computational simulations. Here, we realize through a 15-robot collective many of the predicted swarmalator behaviors when agents are chiral and non-chiral, when there is frequency coupling, and when the natural frequency distribution is homogeneous and heterogeneous. This work presents an experimental platform that can realize many theoretically predicted collective behaviors, it sheds light on the differences between the simulations and experiments, and it will serve in future studies to realize swarmalator and active matter collective behaviors.