You can get a swarming friend by sampling a soil ecosystem near-by! Get out there, isolate a swarming creature from it, grow it on your HomeScope and train it to play My Swarm with you and your friends!
The video above was shot by HomeScope’s video system while its CNC Tiny robot stage scans an area of agar hosting a spatial distribution of a swarming strain of bacteria. This is Paenibacillus over an agar surface! Paenibacillus is a common type of microbe which is very easy to find near-by since it lives all around us in soil ecosystems. This is a group of very smart and social bacteria which are capable of exhibiting amazing collective intelligence. HomeScope nurtures, learns, an interact with this intelligence aiming at experimenting with the symbiosis between cells and machine.
Time-lapse microscopy
If instead of taking video, we take a succession of pictures and then make a video we can see the amazing capabilities of this bacteria. A swarm of Paenibacillus act as a liquid brain and it moves in a collective and coordinated fashion as shown in the movie below.
We can study how collective intelligence is used by these types of bacteria to solve spatial challenges to sustainability in a given spatial ecology.
Machine vision and learning
Machine vision and machine learning algorithms can be use to track different substructures of the swarm like is shown here by a overlaying a blue dot over the “head” of the long distance dispersal structure which develops as the swarm matures and migrates across an habitat landscapes searching for new ecological opportunity elsewhere.