The effective control of microscopic collectives has many promising applications, from environmental remediation to targeted drug delivery. A key challenge is understanding how to control these agents given their limited programmability, and in many cases heterogeneous dynamics. The ability to learn control strategies in real time could allow for the application of robotics solutions to drive the behaviour of microscopic collectives towards desired outcomes. Here, we demonstrate Q-learning on the closed-loop Dynamic Optical Micro-Environment (DOME) platform to control the motion of light-responsive Volvox agents. The results show that Q-learning is efficient in autonomously learning how to reduce the speed of agents on an individual basis.

Issue Section:
General Conference
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© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
2022
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a full description of the license, please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.
Issue Section:
General Conference