How foundation models will revolutionize robot swarms
image:
Conceptual illustration of a foundation model-enabled robot with an onboard neural network, as envisioned for robot swarm deployment.
view moreCredit: Volker Strobel
Robot swarms are systems composed of many simple robots that coordinate without central control. Soon, they could be radically transformed by artificial intelligence. A new viewpoint article by researchers from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium) and the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security (Germany) suggests that foundation models—large AI systems trained on vast amounts of data, familiar to many through applications such as ChatGPT—could fundamentally change how robot swarms are designed, deployed, and operated.
Traditionally, robot control software is manually programmed by experts. This process is time-consuming and often inflexible: programmers must anticipate many possible situations in advance, yet real-world deployments can present unexpected events, from robot sensor failures in warehouse operations to the unpredictable conditions that arise during earthquake response.
The viewpoint argues that embedding foundation models into control software could enable robot swarms to achieve levels of autonomy, flexibility, and adaptability that have so far been out of reach. For this purpose, each robot would be equipped with onboard foundation models that process sensor inputs, such as camera images or temperature readings, and generate corresponding collective actions. This could allow swarms to adapt their behavior in real time, deviate from their original tasks when necessary, and interact more naturally with humans through speech or gestures. Consider a robot swarm monitoring a forest that suddenly locates an injured person. Thanks to the foundation model-based control, the swarm could autonomously switch to the more urgent task of providing assistance — not because it was explicitly programmed to do so but because the situation demanded it.
Before this vision can become a reality, swarm robotics research still needs to overcome hardware limitations and better understand how foundation models can translate the behavior of individual robots into coordinated actions at the swarm level. Security also presents a serious concern. For example, hallucinated outputs, where a foundation model generates plausible but incorrect information, could pose significant reliability issues. The researchers therefore advocate a balanced research approach that considers both the possibilities and the associated risks, incorporating them into a comprehensive ethics-by-design framework.
"Foundation models may lay the foundation for robot swarms that autonomously execute responsible actions that consider how humans would react in a similar situation. At the same time, the probabilistic nature of foundation models raises fundamental questions about the trade-off between autonomy and controllability in autonomous systems," says Dr. Volker Strobel, lead author of the article and researcher at IRIDIA (the artificial intelligence lab at the Université Libre de Bruxelles).
Journal
Science Robotics
Subject of Research
Not applicable
Article Title
How Foundation Models Will Revolutionize Robot Swarms
Robot fish could help explain how our ancient ancestors first learned to walk
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Researchers have developed a fish-like robot that shows how some species of modern fish are able to walk on land, and could help unravel how early vertebrates evolved similar abilities hundreds of millions of years ago.
view moreCredit: Michael Ishida
Researchers have developed a fish-like robot that shows how some species of modern fish are able to walk on land, and could help unravel how early vertebrates evolved similar abilities hundreds of millions of years ago.
Using a combination of their ‘walking fish’ robot and computer models based on observations of real fish, the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, found that a wide range of unrelated species have independently evolved the same basic walking gait, which essentially mimics a swimming motion on land.
This simple walking pattern, which the researchers call an ‘undulating tripod gait’, looks flopping and clumsy, but is actually one of life’s most ancient solutions to a problem: how to escape predators or move from one habitat to another, without specialised limbs.
The gait is mechanically simple – fish propel themselves forward with their tails while using their front fins or head for support – and re-emerges in unrelated fish species, from the African lungfish to armoured catfish. Although individual species of walking fish are well-studied, this is the first time that unifying locomotive principles across multiple species have been identified.
This plausible example of convergent evolution – where different species evolve similar abilities independently – could also help researchers understand how vertebrates first made the transition from water to land, one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth. The results are reported in the journal Nature Communications.
Several species of living fish, including bichirs, lungfish, catfish, sculpin and snakeheads, are capable of walking on land. While they are far more efficient in the water, having an extra mode of locomotion they can use when needed is an evolutionary benefit.
“If you’ve got the ability to walk on land and your predator doesn’t, then you can escape and hopefully the predator moves on,” said lead author Dr Michael Ishida, from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering. “You’ve also got the ability to move from one shallow-water environment to another, like tide pools for example.”
Ishida, an engineer in Professor Fumiya Iida’s lab at Cambridge, worked together with biologists and palaeontologists to study how modern fish walk, and whether those results could be used to help determine how ancient fish made the transition from water to land.
The researchers first created a computer model based on the movements of Polypterus senegalus, a grey bichir native to Africa, and several other walking fish. The model found similar modes of locomotion across several different species.
“We kept seeing this recurring kind of walking motion, although it’s very primitive,” said Ishida. “A number of different fish, spread out across the evolutionary tree, and not closely related to each other, all do it. It’s such a simple movement and can recur from a very basic starting point.”
Ishida and his colleagues called this walking motion an undulating tripod gait: the fish anchors its body with the front fins or head, and uses its tail to push the body forward around that anchor point.
“It looks like a swimming fish dumped onto land,” said Ishida. “A swimming fish uses its body to propel itself through the water, so if you take that, put it on land, give it some ability to shuffle its front fins, that’s exactly what it’s doing.”
The researchers then built a physical robot fish to test their results, and found that the most efficient movement closely matched the bichir’s movements and the results from the computer model.
“We tried all kinds of different gaits on the robot, and every other gait we tried was slower,” said Ishida. “Any time we changed how the body bended, or what sequence it was bended in, it was worse. It was surprising that the optimal walking pattern in the simulation and robot matched what the real fish actually do.”
The researchers say that future work in this area could be applied to fossil fish like Tiktaalik, an important fossil link in the transition from water to land. A similar combination of computer modelling and robotics could help determine how these ancient species first walked on land.
Robot fish could help explain how our ancient ancestors first learned to walk [VIDEO]
Researchers have developed a fish-like robot that shows how some species of modern fish are able to walk on land, and could help unravel how early vertebrates evolved similar abilities hundreds of millions of years ago.
Credit
Michael Ishida
Journal
Nature Communications
Article Title
The undulating tripod gait as a model of the locomotion of walking fish
Article Publication Date
2-Jun-2026
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