Wang Gao, Phan Trung V, Li Shengkai, Wombacher Michael, Qu Junle, Peng Yan, Chen Guo, Goldman Daniel I, Levin Simon A, Austin Robert H, Liu Liyu
Chongqing Key Laboratory of Soft Condensed Matter Physics and Smart Materials, College of Physics, Chongqing University, Chongqing, 400044 China.
Department of Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2021 Mar 12;126(10):108002. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.108002.
We present an ecology-inspired form of active matter consisting of a robot swarm. Each robot moves over a planar dynamic resource environment represented by a large light-emitting diode array in search of maximum light intensity; the robots deplete (dim) locally by their presence the local light intensity and seek maximum light intensity. Their movement is directed along the steepest local light intensity gradient; we call this emergent symmetry breaking motion "field drive." We show there emerge dynamic and spatial transitions similar to gas, crystalline, liquid, glass, and jammed states as a function of robot density, resource consumption rates, and resource recovery rates. Paradoxically the nongas states emerge from smooth, flat resource landscapes, not rough ones, and each state can directly move to a glassy state if the resource recovery rate is slow enough, at any robot density.
我们展示了一种受生态学启发的活性物质形式，它由一群机器人组成。每个机器人在由大型发光二极管阵列表示的平面动态资源环境中移动，以寻找最大光强度；机器人的存在会使局部光强度减弱（变暗），并寻找最大光强度。它们的运动沿着最陡的局部光强度梯度方向；我们将这种涌现的对称性破缺运动称为“场驱动”。我们表明，随着机器人密度、资源消耗率和资源恢复率的变化，会出现类似于气体、晶体、液体、玻璃和堵塞状态的动态和空间转变。矛盾的是，非气体状态出现在平滑、平坦的资源景观中，而不是粗糙的景观中，并且如果资源恢复率足够慢，在任何机器人密度下，每个状态都可以直接转变为玻璃态。
