Foraging, or searching for food and provisions, is how many swarms survive. This experiment compares foraging with different controllers, modeled after real-world devices.
Scientists are using scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) to arrange atoms and make small assemblies. A very tiny sub-microscopic tip is charged with electrical potential, and this charge can be used to repulse like-charged molecules or attract differently-charged molecules. The global controller represents using global field (formed by parallel lines of differently-charged conductors) to pull molecules all in the same direction. See video of a global controller, or our paper.