Scenarios of Swarm Robotics

Chapter 4

Scenarios of Swarm Robotics

All this time we’ve been gazing upwards in anticipation of an alien species arriving from space, when intelligent life-forms have been with us all along, inhabiting part of the planet that we’ve never seriously attempted to explore. —Frank Schätzing, The Swarm From what you say it follows that robots should be constructed quite differently from the way we’ve been doing it in order to be really universal: you’d have to start with tiny elementary building blocks, primary units, pseudo-cells that can replace each other, if necessary. —Stanisław Lem, The Invincible

Abstract We do an extensive check of what typical scenarios of swarm robotics have been investigated and what methods have been published. This is an extensive guide through the literature on swarm robotics. It is structured by the investigated scenarios and starts from tasks of low complexity, such as aggregation and dispersion. A discussion of pattern formation, object clustering, sorting, and self-assembly follows. Collective construction is already a rather complex scenario that combines several subtasks, such as collective decisionmaking and collective transport. We take the example of collective manipulation to discuss the interesting phenomenon of super-linear performance increase. Not only the swarm performance increases with increasing swarm size but even the individual robot’s efficiency. Flocking, collective motion, foraging, and shepherding are discussed as typical examples of swarm behaviors. Bio-hybrid systems as combinations of robots and living organisms are quickly introduced. We conclude with a discussion of what could arguably be called “swarm robotics 2.0”—a few recent very promising approaches, such as error detection, security, swarms as interfaces, and swarm robotics as field robotics.

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018 H. Hamann, Swarm Robotics: A Formal Approach, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74528-2_4

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