AaronBecker

To answer another part of your question "are there technical constraints..", our research has mostly been inspired by practical challenges in micro and nano robotics. At such small scales, it is difficult (presently) to do onboard computation and these robots are generally controlled by a global field that is electric/magnetic/photonic/chemical gradient/gravitational etc.

The 'move without pushing' might require a state change (temperature dependent viscosity?). Perhaps we could use 3D robots that have shorter length scale in some direction than the others, and flip them sideways for flowing. Any suggestions?

What research result surprised you the most when doing your user experiments? Can you suggest an experiment you'd like to see at http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com ?

Nice -- the transparent paths are effective for showing the explored area.

Lately I've started sharing code from my papers -- is your code available? Matlab code is easily shared at MatlabCentral: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/authors/... (my page).

Your paper is interesting. Can you share a link to a video of your simulator in action? Better, is the code still live? It appears that you allowed the user to switch modes between global commands and "attract/repulse". What modes did the users prefer?

The term "assistive swarming" is intriguing. In future work, we'd like to simulate interacting with an intelligent swarm, perhaps a group of Boids (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boids). Our current work is inspired by micro/nano setups by colleagues here at Rice, and RPI, Drexel, and Harvard -- see the videos page for an overview: http://swarmcontrol.herokuapp.com/videos