As an emergent research area by which swarm intelligence is applied to multi-robot systems; swarm robotics (a very particular and peculiar sub-area of collective robotics) studies how to coordinate large groups of relatively simple robots through the use of local rules. It focuses on studying the design of large amount of relatively simple robots, their physical bodies and their controlling behaviors. Since its introduction in 2000, several successful experimentations had been realized, and till now more projects are under investigations. This paper seeks to give an overview of this domain research; for the aim to orientate the readers, especially those who are newly coming to this research field. General TermsSwarm robotics, swarm intelligence, multi-robot systems.

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Using swarm robotics system, with one or more faulty robots, to accomplish specific tasks may lead to degradation in performances complying with the target requirements. In such circumstances, robot swarms require continuous monitoring to detect abnormal events and to sustain normal operations. In this paper, an innovative exogenous fault detection method for monitoring robots swarm is presented. The method merges the flexibility of principal component analysis (PCA) models and the greater sensitivity of the exponentiallyweighted moving average (EWMA) and cumulative sum (CUSUM) control charts to insidious changes. The method is tested and evaluated on a swarm of simulated foot-bot robots performing a circle formation task, via the viscoelastic control model. We illustrate through simulated data collected from the ARGoS simulator that a significant improvement in fault detection can be obtained by using the proposed method where compared to the conventional PCA-based methods (i.e., T 2 and Q).

In certain swarm applications, where the inter-agent distance is not the only factor in the collective behaviours of the swarm, additional properties such as density could have a crucial effect. In this paper, we propose applying a Distance-Weighted K-Nearest Neighbouring (DW-KNN) topology to the behaviour of robot swarms performing self-organized aggregation, in combination with a virtual physics approach to keep the robots together. A distance-weighted function based on a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) interpolation approach, which is used to evaluate the robot density in the swarm, is applied as the key factor for identifying the K-nearest neighbours taken into account when aggregating the robots. The intra virtual physical connectivity among these neighbours is achieved using a virtual viscoelastic-based proximity model. With the ARGoS based-simulator, we model and evaluate the proposed approach, showing various self-organized aggregations performed by a swarm of N foot-bot robots. Also, we compared the aggregation quality of DW-KNN aggregation approach to that of the conventional KNN approach and found better performance.