Swarm robotics
Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of
multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of relatively simple physical
robots. The goal of this approach is to study the design of robots (both their physical body and their controlling
behaviors) such that a desired
collective behavior emerges from the inter-robot interactions and the interactions of the robots with
the environment, inspired but not limited by the
emergent behavior observed in
social insects, called
swarm intelligence. It has been discovered that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors.
Unlike
distributed robotic systems in general, swarm robotics emphasizes a
large number of robots, and promotes
scalability, for instance, by using only local communication. Local communication is usually achieved by
wireless transmission systems, using
radio frequency or
infrared communication.
Potential application for swarm robotics include tasks that demand for extreme
miniaturization (
nanorobotics,
microbotics), on the one hand, as for instance distributed sensing tasks in
micromachinery or the
human body. On the other hand, swarm robotics is suited to tasks that demand for extremely cheap designs, for instance a
mining task, or an agricultural
foraging task. Artists are using swarm robotic techniques to realize new forms of
interactive art installation.
Both miniaturization and cost are hard constraints that emphasize simplicity of the individual team member, and thus motivate a swarm-intelligent approach to achieve meaningful behavior on swarm-level.
Further research is needed to find methodologies that allow for designing, and reliably predicting, swarm behavior, only given features of the individual swarm member.
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Behavior-based robotics*
Nanorobotics*
Microbot*
Multi-agent systems*
Swarm intelligence*
Autonomous agents
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Swarm-Robotics.org*
Didabots. Collective emergent robotics/swarm robotics example, with an on-line video of an experiment with four robots.
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The Swarm-bots project .
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The Autotelematic Spider Bots*
Idaho National Laboratory Swarm Robotics*
SWARM of Merlin Miabot Robots
