Physicomimetics

Standard approaches to understanding swarms rely on inspiration from biology and are generally covered by the term “biomimetics”. This book focuses on a different, complementary inspiration, namely physics. The editors have introduced the term 'physicomimetics' to refer to physics-based swarm approaches, which offer two advantages. First, they capture the notion that “nature is lazy', meaning that physics-based systems always perform the minimal amount of work necessary, which is an especially i