Radhika Nagpal

"The reef was super healthy and colorful, like being in a National Geographic television show,” . “As soon as I put my face in the water, this whole swarm of fish came towards me and then swerved to the right.."

"I got excited about how nature makes these complicated, distributed, mobile networks. Those multi-robot systems became a new direction of my research."

"James is the one that got me into robot swarms by introducing me to all the things that ant and termite colonies do,” Nagpal said. “I got excited about how nature makes these complicated, distributed, mobile networks. James was developing that used similar principles to move around and work together. Those multi-robot systems became a new direction of my research."

"“As far as we know, there isn’t a blueprint or an a priori distribution between who’s doing the building and who is not. We know the queen does not set the agenda,” . “These colonies start with hundreds of termites and expand their structure as they grow.”"

"“I have no idea how that works, “I mean, how do you create systems that are so adaptive?”"

"Instead of having to reason about everybody, your car only has to reason about its five neighbors, I can make the system very large, but each individual’s reasoning space remains constant. That’s a traditional notion of scalable —the amount of processing per vehicle stays constant, but we’re allowed to increase the size of the system.”"

"When you think of an ant, there is not a concentrated set of neurons there,referring to the ant’s 20-microgram brain. “Instead, there is a huge amount of awareness in the body itself. I may wonder how an ant solves a problem, but I have to realize that somehow having a physical body full of sensors makes that easier. We do not really understand how to think about that still.”"

"It’s almost like each individual fish acts like a distributed sensor. Instead of me doing all the work, somebody on the left can say, ‘Hey, I saw something.’ When the group divides the labor so that some of us look out for predators while the rest of us eat, it costs less in terms of energy and resources"

"It’s almost like each individual fish acts like a distributed sensor, Instead of me doing all the work, somebody on the left can say, ‘Hey, I saw something.’ When the group divides the labor so that some of us look out for predators while the rest of us eat, it costs less in terms of energy and resources than trying to eat and look out for predators all by yourself."

"“What’s really interesting about large insect colonies and fish schools is that they do really complicated things in a decentralized way, whereas people have a tendency to build hierarchies as soon as we have to work together, “There is a cost to that, and if we try to do that with that with robots, we replicate the whole management structure and cost of a hierarchy.”"

"The other factor is that Amazon’s robots do a mix of centralized and decentralized decision-making, The robots plan their own paths, but they also use the cloud to know more. That lets us ask: Is it better to know everything about all your neighbors all the time? Or is it better to only know about the neighbors that are closer to you?”"

"There are few others [like Amazon] with hundreds of robots moving around safely in a facility space. And the opportunity to work on algorithms in a deployed system was very exciting."

"“Maybe we could do what Amazon is doing, but do it outside, We could have swarms of robots that actually do some sort of practical task. At Amazon, that task is delivery. But given Boston’s snowstorms, I think shoveling the sidewalks would be nice."