Leveraging swarm capabilities to assist other systems

TL;DR

This paper advocates for using robot swarms as support systems within heterogeneous environments, enabling rapid data access for tasks like surveillance and tracking, thus expanding swarm robotics applications.

Contribution

It introduces the novel concept of leveraging swarm capabilities to assist other systems, moving beyond isolated swarm studies to support heterogeneous system integration.

Findings

Swarm robots can effectively support data acquisition in unknown environments.

Supporting other systems enhances the applicability of swarm robotics.

Potential for improved target tracking and surveillance tasks.

Abstract

Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient, independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm robotics. A robot swarm could act as a support in an heterogeneous system comprising other robots and/or human operators, in particular by quickly providing access to a large amount of data acquired in large unknown environments. Tasks such as target identification & tracking, scouting, or monitoring/surveillance could benefit from this approach.