SUMMARYWe 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. We identify and describe the challenges that should be resolved when designing swarm robotic systems for real world applications. Finally, we provide a summary of a series of issues that should be addressed to overcome these challenges, and propose directions for future swarm robotic research based on our extensive analysis of the reviewed literature.

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A distributed control mechanism for ground moving nonholonomic robots is proposed. It enables a group of mobile robots to autonomously manage formation shapes while navigating through environments with obstacles. The formation can be maintained without the need of any inter-robot communication. Obstacle avoidance is designed to be performed by the individual robots themselves. Formation scaling is implemented to ensure the formation shape is maintained for as long as possible. If the formation fails to hold its shape when navigating through environments with obstacles, formation morphing has been incorporated to preserve the interconnectivity of the robots, thus reducing the possibility of losing robots from the formation.The algorithm has been implemented on a nonholonomic multi-robot system for empirical analysis. Experimental results demonstrate formations completing an obstacle course within 12 seconds with zero collisions. Furthermore, the system is capable of withstanding up to 25% sensor noise.