Swarm Robotics

Abstract

Swarm robotics is an approach to coordinating a highly redundant group of robots. A robot swarm is an autonomous entity that acts in a self‐organized way: the complexity of its collective behaviors is the result of the local interactions between the individual robots. A robot swarm neither has a leader nor any other centralized entity that is responsible for its coordination. Self‐organization, high redundancy, and the lack of single points of failure promote fault tolerance, scalability, and flexibility. These are desired properties for systems deemed to successfully function in the real world. However, these properties also pose a challenging engineering problem: the behavior of the individual robot cannot be conceived individually: it must be conceived by considering the collective behavior that it produces when executed by a large number of robots. Designing the robot–robot and the robot–environment interactions that would result in the desired collective behavior is a difficult endeavor. Research toward the definition of an engineering methodology for designing, analyzing, and maintaining robot swarms is currently ongoing. In this article, we present swarm robotics from an engineering perspective: we describe works that contribute to the advancement of swarm robotics as an engineering field and to its forthcoming uptake in real‐world applications.

Behavior Trees as a Control Architecture in the Automatic Modular Design of Robot Swarms

“…In swarm robotics, a group of simple robots works together to achieve a common goal that is beyond the capabilities of a single robot [34,2,11,5,19,4]. The collective behavior of the swarm is the result of the local interactions that each robot has with its neighboring peers and with the environment.…”

Swarm Robotics: A Perspective on the Latest Reviewed Concepts and Applications

“…In recent years, various reviews on SR have been produced. Here we cite some of these works [ 2 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 ]. Each of these reviews works discourses a specific feature of SRs.…”

“…They also collaborate too many exhausting brief taxonomies: one for methods and the other for tasks required in SRs. Garattoni and Birattari [ 8 ] studied existent research works on SRs, addressing the description of an engineering process for creation, analyzing, and conserving robotic swarms. The authors then introduce SR from an engineering outlook and report associated works that subscribe to SR’s progress as an engineering area.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Automatic modular design of robot swarms using behavior trees as a control architecture (v0.1)"

“…In swarm robotics, a large group of autonomous robots cooperate to perform a mission that is beyond the limited capabilities of a single robot (Beni, 2004;Ş ahin, 2004;Brambilla et al, 2013;Garattoni and Birattari, 2016). A robot swarm is highly redundant, self-organized, and decentralized in nature.…”