Can you infiltrate a cockroach colony with robots and steer its collective decisions? Physicist José Halloy explains how simple mathematical models from statistical physics capture the self-organizing behavior of animal groups , and how biomimetic robots that smell like cockroaches can be used to test and manipulate these models from the inside. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. José Halloy joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to describe his work on collective behavior in animal-robot hybrid societies. Drawing on dynamical systems theory, Halloy and colleagues have shown that cockroach aggregation under shelters can be modeled with a small set of differential equations capturing positive feedback from social attraction and negative feedback from environmental saturation. The key in ...