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A group of small, wiggling (扭动) robots that communicate by flashing lights can make collective decisions. This is similar to the process bees use to reach a consensus on where to build their nest.

“We believe that in the near future there are going to be simple robots that will do jobs that we don’t want to do, and it will be very important that they make decisions in an autonomous manner,” says Carmen Miguel at the University of Barcelona in Spain. She and her team tested how imitating bees might help with that.

When bees go house-hunting, they communicate their preferred locations through a “wiggle dance”. The more a bee recommends one location, the longer and harder it wiggles. Eventually other bees join them, and they reach a consensus when a majority are wiggling together. Researchers previously translated this behavior into a mathematical model, and Miguel and her colleagues used it to program decision-making rules into small robots called kilobots.

Each kilobot with three thin legs had an infrared-light emitter (红外线发射器) and receiver, and a colored LED light. Within a group, kilobots could move around, turn clockwise or anticlockwise and use infrared signals to exchange information.

Ezequiel Ferrero at the University of Barcelona says that across all the experiments, kilobots reached a consensus within about half an hour, even when they didn’t have many immediate neighbors to communicate with. He says that getting the right combination of how long they spend transmitting their message and how much they walk around allowed them to make a collective decision in the end.