In recent years, active matter has gained importance as a research subject in numerous scientific contexts. Active matter refers to active ‘agents' that consume energy to move and exert mechanical forces and it is a suitable definition for numerous systems of biological origin, starting with bacterial colonies and moving through all scales of reality up to animal macrosystems, such as flocks of birds or schools of fish. Active matter is an important object of study to understand the behaviour of this type of systems and more generally to find a way to artificially create synthetic models that exploit artificial self-propelled particles.