A swarm of robots is the coordination of multiple robots that can perform a collective task and solve a problem more efficiently than a single robot.
Over the last decade, swarm robotics research has received significant interest from scientists due to its large field of applications in military or civil, including area exploration, target search and rescue, security and surveillance, agriculture, air defense, area coverage and real-time monitoring, providing wireless services, and delivery of goods.
Swarm robots are differentiated from multi-agent robots by specific qualifying criteria, including the presence of at least three agents and the sharing of relative information such as altitude, position, and velocity among all agents. Each agent should be intelligent and follow the same set of interaction rules over the whole network.
Also, the system’s stability should not be affected by leaving or disconnecting an agent from a swarm.
The results of biological studies of insects, namely ants and bees, as well as the results of studies in other areas of nature where swarming behavior takes place, were adapted in the direction of artificial swarm intelligence.
The activity of the whole swarm should condition each action of a robot unit in such a system. Interaction and interconnection between rank-and-file robots in the system are ordered, and each member has rules and tasks.
It is the interaction between group members that creates constant feedback. Accordingly, the complex organized behavior of the whole swarm is embodied through simple rules of individual conduct.
While practical applications of swarm robotics are still limited, swarm robots could be used to monitor hostile environments, improving safety, reducing costs and resource use, and providing capabilities far beyond those of individual robots.
Robot swarms could be used to monitor radioactive locations underwater environments and in critical search and rescue missions in areas hit by natural or human-made disasters.
In the military sphere, DARPA is funding approaches to enhancing the intelligent behavior of robot swarms by utilizing human intelligence.
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