Orderly hysteresis in field-driven robot swarm active matter

Boundary effect and time-reversal symmetry are hot topics in active matter. We present a biology-inspired robot-environment-interaction active matter system with the field-drive motion and the rules of resource search, resource consumption, and resource recovery. In an environmental compression–expansion cycle, the swarm emerges a series of boundary-dependent phase transitions, and the whole evolution process is time-reversal symmetry-breaking; we call this phenomenon “orderly hysteresis”. We present the influence of the environmental recovery rate on the dynamic collective behavior of the swarm.