Autonomous Robots for Intelligent Matter
Giovanni Volpe
Toward Intelligent Behavior in Macroscopic Active Matter
Time: 09:00
Date: 6 July 2026
Place: CECAM-HQ-EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Giovanni Volpe gave the invited talk “Autonomous Robots for Intelligent Matter” at the CECAM workshop “Toward Intelligent Behavior in Macroscopic Active Matter”, held at CECAM-HQ-EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, from 6 to 8 July 2026.
Active matter provides a framework for understanding systems composed of self-driven units, ranging from microscopic particles to animal groups and robotic swarms. While traditional active-matter models often describe agents through relatively simple interaction rules, autonomous robotic systems introduce additional capabilities such as sensing, information processing, decision-making, memory, and adaptation.
In his talk, Giovanni discussed how autonomous robots can provide experimental platforms for exploring these emerging forms of intelligent matter. By combining self-propulsion and physical interactions with sensing, feedback, and learning, robotic agents can adapt their behaviour to their surroundings and coordinate with one another, providing a bridge between active-matter physics and embodied intelligence.
These systems offer opportunities to investigate how complex collective behaviours emerge from interactions between individual agents and their environment, while also providing new approaches for designing adaptive and programmable matter. More broadly, they illustrate the growing convergence between statistical physics, robotics, nonlinear dynamics, and machine learning in the study of intelligent active systems.