# Swarm Engineering Through Quantitative Measurement of Swarm Robotic Principles in a 10,000 Robot Swarm

## TL;DR

This paper introduces quantitative metrics for evaluating swarm robotic principles, demonstrating their effectiveness in designing large-scale swarms of over 10,000 robots for complex tasks under varying conditions.

## Contribution

The paper proposes a set of scalable, flexible, and emergence metrics for swarm design, validated through large-scale simulation experiments.

## Key findings

- Metrics effectively assess scalability, flexibility, and emergence.
- Successful large-scale object gathering with 10,000+ robots.
- Metrics guide iterative hypothesis evaluation for swarm design.

## Abstract

When designing swarm-robotic systems, systematic comparison of algorithms from different domains is necessary to determine which is capable of scaling up to handle the target problem size and target operating conditions. We propose a set of quantitative metrics for scalability, flexibility, and emergence which are capable of addressing these needs during the system design process. We demonstrate the applicability of our proposed metrics as a design tool by solving a large object gathering problem in temporally varying operating conditions using iterative hypothesis evaluation. We provide experimental results obtained in simulation for swarms of over 10,000 robots.