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About

Mengyuan Duan is a rising leader in swarm robotics and active matter, whose work bridges experimental robotics and theoretical physics to uncover the fundamental principles of collective behavior. Her research centers on three key areas: nonreciprocal interactions in active systems, self-organized multi-target trapping, and the criticality hypothesis in biological swarms. Duan's most impactful contribution is her 2024 study on emergent chirality and hyperuniformity in an active mixture with nonreciprocal interactions, which has already garnered 37 citations. In this work, she used programmable robots to experimentally demonstrate how nonreciprocal alignment rules can drive the spontaneous formation of chiral structures and hyperuniform states—a finding with profound implications for understanding living systems and designing novel materials. She also developed a density-based interaction method for self-organized multi-target trapping (20 citations) and experimentally validated the criticality hypothesis using swarm robots (18 citations), showing that swarms near phase transitions achieve optimal responsiveness. Her distributed outmost push approach for multirobot herding (13 citations) offers a practical solution for robotic herding tasks. Duan's minimalist self-localization method for indoor swarm robots further demonstrates her commitment to enabling real-world applications. Her work is notable for its elegant combination of theory, simulation, and physical robot experiments, making complex collective phenomena tangible and testable.