In this article we describe the re-embodiment of biological aggregation behavior of honeybees in Jasmine micro-robots. The observed insect behavior, in the context of the insect's sensor-actor system, is formalized as behavioral and motion-sensing meta-models. These meta-models are transformed into a sensor-actor system of micro-robots by means of a sensors virtualization technique. This allows us to keep the efficiency and scalability of the bio-inspired approach. We also demonstrate the systematic character of this re-embodiment procedure on collective aggregation in a real robotic swarm.

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Besides the life-as-it-could-be driver of artificial life research there is also the concept of extending natural life by creating hybrids or mixed societies that are built from both natural and artificial components. In this paper, we motivate and present the research program of the project flora robotica. We present our concepts of control, hardware design, modeling, and human interaction along with preliminary experiments. Our objective is to develop and to investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce architectural artifacts and living spaces. These robot-plant bio-hybrids create synergies that allow for new functions of plants and robots. They also create novel design opportunities for an architecture that fuses the design and construction phase. The bio-hybrid is an example of mixed societies between 'hard artificial and 'wet natural life, which enables an interaction between natural and artificial ecologies. They form an embodied, selforganizing, and distributed cognitive system which is supposed to grow and develop over long periods of time resulting in the creation of meaningful architectural structures. A key idea is to assign equal roles to robots and plants in order to create a highly integrated, symbiotic system. Besides the gain of knowledge, this project has the objective to create a bio-hybrid system with a defined function and application -growing architectural artifacts.

In this work we investigate spatial collective decision-making in a swarm of microrobots, inspired by the thermotactic aggregation behavior of honeybees. The sensing and navigation capabilities of these robots are intentionally limited; no digital sensor data processing and no direct communication are allowed. In this way, we can approximate the features of smaller mesoscopic-scale systems and demonstrate that even such a limited swarm is nonetheless able to exhibit simple forms of intelligent and adaptive collective behavior

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