Swarm Robotic Behaviors in Real-World Applications

Spiderino - a low-cost robot for swarm
research and educational purposes

With potential benefits from self-organization (e.g., resilience, scalability, and adaptivity to dynamic environments) the motivation is strong to apply swarm robotics in industrial applications. While there exist several swarm robotics research platforms that are developed for educational and scientific purposes, many industrial applications still rely on centralized control. Moreover, in cases where a multi-robot solution is employed, the principal idea of swarm robotics of distributed decision making is often not implemented. To address this topic, the paper

Melanie Schranz, Micha Sende, Martina Umlauft, and Wilfried Elmenreich. Swarm robotic behaviors and current applications. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7(36), 2020. (doi:10.3389/frobt.2020.00036)

The e-puck, a robot designed for
education in engineering

provides a collection and categorization of swarm robotic behaviors. Along with this taxonomy, the paper gives a comprehensive overview of research platforms and industrial projects and products, separated into terrestrial, aerial, aquatic, and outer space. In a final discussion, the authors identify several open issues including dependability, emergent characteristics, security and safety, communication as hindrances for the implementation of fully distributed autonomous swarm systems.

The paper was published as part of a Research Topic on Designing Self-Organization in the Physical Realm in the Frontiers in Robotics and AI journal.

In another paper in this issue,

Danesh Tarapore, Roderich Groß, and Klaus-Peter Zauner. Sparse robot swarms: Moving swarms to real-world applications. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7(36), 2020. (doi:10.3389/frobt.2020.00083)

the authors address a common property of swarms: the underlying assumption that the robots act in close proximity of each other (for example a few body lengths apart), and typically employ uninterrupted, situated, close-range communication for coordination. Many real-world applications, including environmental monitoring and precision agriculture, however, require scalable groups of robots to act jointly over larger distances (e.g., 1000 body lengths), rendering the use of dense swarms impractical. Using a dense swarm for such applications would be invasive to the environment and unrealistic in terms of mission deployment, maintenance, and post-mission recovery. To address this problem, the paper proposes a sparse swarm concept, which is illustrated via four application scenarios.