Simon Garnier
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Ecology & Evolution
Bodies keep their temperature steady using fixed circuits of sensors and responders, much like a thermostat. Groups of loosely connected, moving individuals, such as an ant colony or a fleet of robots, have no such fixed wiring.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Engineering
Biology
- Topics
collective behavior
ants
social insects
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test whether ant colonies regulate their collective energy when energy demand or availability changes weakly or strongly, and how this affects productivity, using computer-vision behavioral tracking and physiological measurements.
- Develop a network-theory framework, built on the ant data, that identifies which behavioral rules let loosely connected, self-organizing groups succeed or fail at collective regulation.
- Design energy-management strategies for robot swarms and test their efficiency in simulations and robot experiments, aiming to balance energy supply and demand in unpredictable environments.
More about the research
How do they still keep their collective activity in balance when conditions change? This collaborative project brings together biologists, theoreticians and engineers. It uses energy regulation in ant colonies as a model and aims to turn what it learns into design rules for robot swarms.
Why it matters
Understanding how ant colonies keep their energy in balance without any central control could help engineers build robot swarms and other distributed systems. Such systems could manage their own energy and keep working in uncertain or changing environments. The work also adds basic knowledge of how social groups succeed or fail at maintaining stable function.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Smith
Auburn University, AL·Ecology & Evolution
Produce the first 3-dimensional description of how Western honeybee (Apis mellifera) nests are organized as colonies grow, develop and reproduce, using a field-ready photography rig to image combs over time.
Petras Swissler
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Engineering
Develop a swarm of interlocking hexagonal robotic tiles with motorized surfaces and docking interfaces that self-assemble into all-terrain conveyors, drawing on how fire ants link bodies into rafts.
Joseph Parker
California Institute of Technology, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Compare free-living and ant-associated rove beetles to trace how new cell types and biosynthetic pathways let beetles chemically defend against ants or manipulate ant behavior.
The school
New Jersey Institute of Technology: 12 labs on PI Pages, $172M a year on research, 74 research doctorates a year.
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