Editorial: Designing Self-Organization in the Physical Realm

Abstract

The design and deployment of decentralized systems can benefit from self-organization as it introduces key features, such as resilience, scalability, and adaptivity to dynamic environments. However, whenever self-organization was demonstrated on physical platforms (e.g., robot swarms), this was performed mostly within controlled laboratory conditions. The real world comes with severe requirements, calling for robust design methodologies, their standardization, and validation via benchmarking toolsets. With this Research Topic, we collect, benchmark, and survey novel approaches to push self-organization toward real-world applications, focusing on embodied artificial systems, such as multi-robot, cyber-physical, and socio-technical systems.