A Mechanical Origin of Cooperative Transport

Abstract Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale 1–5, reproducing the effect in artificial swarms remains challenging, as it requires synchronization in a noisy many-body system 6–27. Here we show that cooperative transport spontaneously emerges in swarms of stochastic self-propelled agents, without requiring any form of sensing, feedback, or control. We show that a minute modification to the mechanical design of the individual agent dramatically changes its alignment response to an external force. We experimentally demonstrate that with the proper design, a swarm of active particles spontaneously cooperates in the directional transport of larger objects. Surprisingly, transport increases with increasing payload size. A mechanical, coarse-grained description reveals that force-alignment is intrinsic and captured by a signed, charge-like parameter with units of curvature. Numerical simulations of swarms of active particles with a negative active charge corroborate the experimental findings. We analytically derive a geometrical criterion for cooperative transport which results from a bifurcation in a non-linear dynamical system. Our findings generalize existing models of active particles 28–37, offer new design rules for distributed robotic systems, and shed light on cooperative transport in natural swarms.