Statistical Correlations in Active Matter Based on Robotic Swarms

Robotic swarms are a promising tool for exploring the fundamental physics of active matter. In these designed systems, large assemblies of simple robots exhibit versatile dynamical behavior and a broad range of collective phenomena. However, extracting detailed statistical data for the behavior of large-scale robotic ensembles remains challenging due to the amount of measurements required and the need for computational resources for processing. In this paper, we introduce an experimental setup based on a robotic swarm complete with the necessary hardware and software platforms. Performing extensive experiments and extracting detailed kinematic information, we reveal a rich set of spatial correlations in stochastic robotic ensembles on the friction between individual robots and their packing density.