The cooperation of swarm-bots

Autonomous …, 2004

The swarm intelligence paradigm has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Several robotics implementations of this paradigm confirm that these properties can be exploited for the control of a population of physically independent mobile robots.

Swarm robotics is a fast growing field of multi-robotics. In thisnumber of robots are coordinated in a distributed and uncentralised way. It is based on the use common rules, and simple robots compared to the nature of the task which is to achieve, this task may be complex.Swarm robotics is inspired by social insects. Large number of simple robots is able to perform complex tasks in a more efficient way than a single robot. This improves the efficiency and provides flexibility the group. In this article, an overview of swarm robotics is given, describing its main properties and characteristics and comparing it to general multi-robotic systems. A discussion of the future swarm robotics in real world applications completes this work.

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems inspired from natural biological systems such as ant colonies, bird flocking, animal herding, bacterial growth, and fish schooling. Swarm Robotics (SR) is an emerging application of swarm principles to robots, it is the study of how to design groups of homogeneous, small and cheap robots that mimicking insects and animals and acts together for robust, scalable and flexible swarm robotic systems. Swarm robots operate without depending upon any external control and infrastructure, the behaviour of robots depends on interactions between robots and between the robots and the environment in which they act. Swarm Robotics has effectively applied in tasks that are risky and difficult for human being or single robot. This Paper is a review of swarm robotics from origin to its future. It contains discussion on introduction to swarm robotics, design of robot swarm, design of robotics collective behaviours, and interaction mechanism and future of swarm robotics.

2005

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotics project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Commission (IST-2000-31010). We describe the s-bot, a small autonomous robot with self-assembling capabilities that we designed and built within the project. Then we illustrate the cooperative object transport scenario that we chose to use as a test-bed for our robots.

SUMMARY We present a review of recent activities in swarm robotic research, and analyse existing literature in the field to determine how to get closer to a practical swarm robotic system for real world applications. We begin with a discussion of the importance of swarm robotics by illustrating the wide applicability of robot swarms in various tasks. Then a brief overview of various robotic devices that can be incorporated into swarm robotic systems is presented.

Drones

A swarm of robots is the coordination of multiple robots that can perform a collective task and solve a problem more efficiently than a single robot. Over the last decade, this area of research has received significant interest from scientists due to its large field of applications in military or civil, including area exploration, target search and rescue, security and surveillance, agriculture, air defense, area coverage and real-time monitoring, providing wireless services, and delivery of goods. This research domain of collective behaviour draws inspiration from self-organizing systems in nature, such as honey bees, fish schools, social insects, bird flocks, and other social animals. By replicating the same set of interaction rules observed in these natural swarm systems, robot swarms can be created. The deployment of robot swarm or group of intelligent robots in a real-world scenario that can collectively perform a task or solve a problem is still a substantial research challeng...

Swarm Intelligence, 2008

Advances in Computational Intelligence and Robotics

Robotic swarms represent the application target of the studies presented in this book and therefore required the reader to be acquainted with the main concepts behind this branch of robotics. The introduction of swarm robotics principles is done only after presenting multi-robot systems, in comparison with single robot systems. Among the concepts that are defined in this chapter we mention: swarm robotic system, stigmergy and neighborhoods. After this theoretical introduction, the chapter continues with a presentation of robotic platforms that can be used to validate swarm algorithms. Among the robots listed are the Kilobot, the e-puck and the Khepera. As swarm robotics generally requires a large number of individuals, the costs of running experiments on real robots can become high. For this reason, robot simulation platforms are also discussed at the end of this chapter.

2015

The swarm robotics inspired from nature is a combination of swarm intelligence and robotics, which shows a great potential in several aspects. It is important to study swarm robotics system because it has desirable properties unlikely to be found in other systems, for example they scale very well; there is no single point of failure, making swarm systems very robust and well suited in operating in safety critical situations. As research progresses in robot system, more and more aspects are explored in multi robot system. This paper describes advances in multi robot system and discusses the current state of art. The focus is principally on the research that has been demonstrated in various entity projects.

ACM Computing Surveys

The behaviour of social insects such as bees and ants has influenced the development of swarm robots. To enable robots to cooperate together, swarm robotics employs principles such as communication, coordination, and collaboration. Collaboration among multiple robots can lead to a faster task completion time compared to the utilisation of a single, complex robot. One of the key aspects of swarm robotics is that control is distributed uniformly across the robots in the swarm, which boosts the system’s resilience and fault-tolerance. Through the use of the robots’ embodied sensors and actuators, this distributed control often facilitates the emergence of collective behaviours through the interaction of the robots with one another and with the environment. The purpose of this survey is to examine the reasons behind the lack of utilisation of swarm robots in multi-tasking applications, which will be accomplished by studying previous research works in the field. We examine the literature...