Past, Present, and Future of Swarm Robotics

TL;DR

Swarm robotics mimics natural swarms to create scalable, flexible, and robust robotic systems with decentralized control, applicable across various fields, and this paper reviews its history, features, projects, and future prospects.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive review of swarm robotics, covering its evolution, key features, simulation tools, real-world applications, and future research directions.

Findings

Swarm robotics is inspired by natural swarms like ants and birds.

Decentralized control and self-organization are core features.

Applications range from household tasks to military missions.

Abstract

Swarm Robotics is an emerging field of adapting the phenomenon of natural swarms to robotics. It is a study of robots that are aimed to mimic natural swarms, like ants and birds, to form a system that is scalable, flexible, and robust. These robots show self-organization, autonomy, cooperation, and coordination amongst themselves. The cost and design complexity factor is aimed to keep low, hence trying to form systems that are very much similar to natural swarms. The robots operate without any central entity to control them, and the communication amongst the robots can either be direct (robot-to-robot) or indirect (robot-to-environment). Swarm robotics has a wide range of application fields, from simple household tasks to military missions. This paper reviews the swarm robotics approach from its history to its future. It discusses the basic idea of swarm robotics, its important features, simulators, projects, real life applications and some future ideas.