{"id":219569,"date":"2025-08-07T04:29:23","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T09:29:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/friction-that-cools-threshold-effects-enable-self-stopping-robot-swarms"},"modified":"2025-08-07T04:29:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T09:29:23","slug":"friction-that-cools-threshold-effects-enable-self-stopping-robot-swarms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/friction-that-cools-threshold-effects-enable-self-stopping-robot-swarms","title":{"rendered":"Friction that cools: Threshold effects enable self-stopping robot swarms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/friction-that-cools-threshold-effects-enable-self-stopping-robot-swarms.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>How can a horde of active robots be automatically brought to a standstill? By arresting their dynamics in a self-sustained way. This phenomenon was discovered by physicists at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf (HHU) and La Sapienza University in Rome. The threshold principle of static friction with the ground plays a decisive role here: it removes the kinetic energy of two robots after a mutual collision so efficiently that they can no longer set themselves in motion.<\/p>\n<p>The researchers <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-025-62626-9\" target=\"_blank\">describe<\/a> in the journal <i>Nature Communications<\/i> that this fundamental effect can also be used to construct controllable moving <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/robot\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">robot<\/a> systems.<\/p>\n<p>Friction creates heat, as anyone knows who has rubbed their hands together in winter weather. And <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/friction\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">friction<\/a> costs energy. Road friction on vehicle tires, for example, will cause a moving car to steadily slow down unless the accelerator is used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How can a horde of active robots be automatically brought to a standstill? By arresting their dynamics in a self-sustained way. This phenomenon was discovered by physicists at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf (HHU) and La Sapienza University in Rome. The threshold principle of static friction with the ground plays a decisive role here: it removes [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,6,1491],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-219569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-robotics-ai","category-transportation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=219569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/219569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=219569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=219569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=219569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}