We are on the verge of an autonomous era as we are witnessing the surge of more intelligent robots and large language models. It is still puzzling how tens of billions of neurons can work together and give rise to intelligence and consciousness. In this project, we try to use physics-based way of thinking to approach this fundamental question. More specifically, we will use theory and simulation to model how a collection of active particles or robots with limited or no intelligence can lead to various emerging, intelligence-like behaviors such as autonomous motion and obstacle avoidance. We then try to incorporate our knowledge about brain science into this physical model to develop a more realistic model, which can be used to predict the behaviors of animal swarms and to design more collaborative robots and drones.