A Systematic Review of Swarm Robots

Abstract

Advances in robotics have paved the way for a novel approach of organizing large numbers of robots, otherwise referred to as multi-robots. Multi-robots can either be homogenous or heterogeneous. Nevertheless, a group of autonomous and relatively homogenous robots that interacts with one another as well as with their environment is referred to as swarm robots. Swarm robots are biologically inspired by natural swarms as found in animal societies such as birds and fishes as well as social insects such as honey bees, wasps, termites and ants. Hence, they exhibit certain properties which are similar to those found in these creatures such as aggregation, self-organization, foraging as well as flocking. Swarm robots work together to achieve a desired goal, which is usually too complex for a single robot to accomplish. They are typically characterized by simplicity of individuals, fault tolerance, autonomy, parallelism, high reliability, scalability as well as robustness. They can be used for mining, military, medical and agricultural activities. They can also be used for search and rescue missions, toxic waste cleanup, and for piling sandbags along coastlines in preparation for floods or hurricane. Nevertheless, swarm robots are plagued with the stigma of widespread, interference, uncertainty, safety and lack of reliable communication. Furthermore, studies in swarm robotics are practically limited to virtual reality simulations. Hence, the principles of swarm robotics are rarely applied to real-life problems. It is against this background that this study systematically explores swarm robots. This study reviewed eighty literatures relating to swarm robots. These literatures were obtained from journal articles, technical reports, books, and conference proceedings. The selection of these literatures was based on their relevance to the research problem. This study revealed that the application of swarm robots to real life problems would promote the development of systems that are robust, fault tolerant and scalable.

A unifying method-based classification of robot swarm spatial self-organisation behaviours

“…Another definition many authors agree on (Brambilla et al, 2013; Trianni & Campo, 2015; Bayındır, 2016; Nedjah & Junior, 2019; Olaronke et al, 2020; Schranz et al, 2020; Cheraghi et al, 2021) states that aggregation is the grouping of agents distributed in the environment so that they are close enough to interact with each other. This definition can be seen as more precise than the previous ones because it provides a distance criterion that can be relied upon to qualify an aggregate.…”

“…Other authors (Ugur et al, 2007; Mathews et al, 2012; Panerati et al, 2018; Bayert & Khorbotly, 2019; Nedjah & Junior, 2019; Olaronke et al, 2020) define area coverage as the dispersion of a swarm of agents in the environment with the objective of covering the largest possible area without losing the communication link with the rest of the group. This definition has the advantage of including the properties of the aggregation behaviour that aims to maintain social contact between the agents composing the swarm while keeping the agents as far away as possible from each other.…”

“…and method-based (eg virtual forces, artificial evolution, etc.) classifications have been previously proposed (Brambilla et al, 2013; Trianni & Campo, 2015; Bayındır, 2016; Rossi et al, 2018; Nedjah & Junior, 2019; Olaronke et al, 2020; Schranz et al, 2020; Cheraghi et al, 2021). Methods that are identical, but implemented differently or for different objectives, are usually split up into different categories.…”

HeRo 2.0: A Low-Cost Robot for Swarm Robotics Research

“…Swarm robots have some elementary features that differentiate them from other types of platforms, such as simplicity, the capacity to scale and cooperate, size, and communication capabilities, among others [22]. Especially, some critical aspects for a swarm robot are footprint and cost, as those two aspects will facilitate the scalability of a real-world swarm system.…”

Constructing a cohesive pattern for collective navigation based on a swarm of robotics

“…Swarm robotics is a research field that studies how mobile robots are organized using the local rules (Trianni & Campo, 2015). Most swarm robotics picks their inspiration from nature swarms (Olaronke et al, 2020), like animals, fish and social insects (Hamann, 2018;Berlinger, Gauci & Nagpal, 2021). Swarm robotics carries out complex tasks beyond the power of simple individual robots.…”