哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）学术讲座

Speaker：徐子晨 （University of Macau, PhD）

Title: Swarm Intelligence Inspired Robot Designs and Applications

Date：2025-07-17（Thu. 周四）   Time：10:00-11:00

Venue: M805

Host: 张宏伟

摘要（Abstract)：

Swarm intelligence offers a bioinspired paradigm for amplifying the capabilities of simple robotic units through coordinated collective behaviors. This talk presents swarm intelligence–inspired robot designs, uniting two bioinspired robotic systems that leverage collective behavior and structural simplicity to achieve advanced functionality. First, we find the robustness of collective systems can be enabled by enhancing the connections among micro-individuals. Thus, the proposed microrobot collectives can achieve Newton-level force output. These swarms demonstrate programmable transformations and task execution in fluidic, solid, and gravity-challenging environments. Second, we present a cilia-inspired soft gripper composed of wire-actuated silicone tubes that rapidly entangle with target objects. An increased number of simple structures effectively compensates for the functional deficiency of structural simplicity. One possible future direction of gripper design is to consider increasing the number of 'simple fingers' rather than optimizing the sophisticated total designs and functional integration. Both systems reflect the principles of swarm intelligence, achieving global functionality through local interactions among simple agents. Collectively, they demonstrate a potential path for the next generation of robot designs.

报告人简介(About the speaker):

Dr. Zichen Xu received his Ph.D. from the University of Macau in 2025/06, supervised by Prof. Qingsong Xu. His research focuses on microrobotics, medical robots, soft robots, and collective behaviors. Dr. Xu has published more than 20 peer-reviewed papers, such as Science Advances, Research, ACS Nano, Nano Letters, and so on. He aims at developing microrobot system and platform that are wirelessly actuated and precisely controlled for assignments in constrain space. Physical intelligence inspired multi-scale robot design is also his focus, ranging from microscale to macroscale, such as biorobots, soft robots, microrobots, and so on.