Taking cues from bottom-up biological networks like those of social insects, Radhika Nagpal helped design an unprecedented “swarm” of ant-like robots.
Why you should listen
With a swarm of 1,024 robots inspired by the design of ant colonies, Radhika Nagpal and her colleagues at Harvard’s SSR research group have redefined expectations for self-organizing robotic systems. Guided by algorithms, Nagpal’s shockingly simple robots guide themselves into a variety of shapes -- an ability that, brought to scale, might lead to applications like disaster rescue, space exploration and beyond.
In addition to her work with biologically inspired robots, Nagpal helped create ROOT, a simple robot to teach coding to would-be programmers through a simple user interface suitable for students of all ages.
What others say
[Radhika Nagpla] is applying nature’s approach to decentralized cooperation to engineer new collective systems that meet real-world challenges.
Radhika Nagpal’s TED Talk
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Live from TED2017
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Are machines going to save or destroy us? It’s a question we’ve been grappling with since we first put 1s and 0s together to create computer code. And it feels like we’re no closer to answering it; machines are growing smarter by the day, and while they’re taking us to places we’ve never imagined, we […]
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Harnessing the intelligence of the collective: Radhika Nagpal speaks at TED2017
April 25, 2017
Computer scientist Radhika Nagpal’s defining moment came on a snorkeling trip in the Bahamas. As she stuck her head beneath the surface, trying hard to breathe through the narrow plastic tube, she saw a huge school of yellow-and-black striped fish. She was struck by how the school swerved to change direction not as if it […]
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