Swarm robotics and Applications

Swarm robotics is the study of how to design groups of robots that operate without relying on any external infrastructure or on any form of centralized control. In a robot swarm, the collective behaviour of the robots results from local interactions between the robots and between the robots and the environment in which they act. The design of robot swarms is guided by swarm intelligence principles. These principles promote the realization of systems that are fault tolerant, scalable and flexible. Swarm robotics appears to be a promising approach when different activities must be performed concurrently, when high redundancy and the lack of a single point of failure are desired, and when it is technically infeasible to set up the infrastructure required to control the robots in a centralized way. Examples of tasks that could be profitably tackled using swarm robotics are demining, search and rescue, planetary or underwater exploration, and surveillance.

A robot swarm is a self-organizing multi-robot system characterized by high redundancy. Robots’ sensing and communication capabilities are local and robots do not have access to global information. The collective behaviour of the robot swarm emerges from the interactions of each individual robot with its peers and with the environment. Typically, a robot swarm is composed of homogeneous robots, although some examples of heterogeneous robot swarms do exist.

Properties

The aforementioned characteristics of swarm robotics are deemed to promote the realization of systems that are fault tolerant, scalable and flexible.

Swarm robotics promotes the development of systems that are able to cope well with the failure of one or more of their constituent robots: the loss of individual robots does not imply the failure of the whole swarm. Fault tolerance is enabled by the high redundancy of the swarm: the swarm does not rely on any centralized control entity, leaders, or any individual robot playing a predefined role.

Swarm robotics also enables the development of systems that are able to cope well with changes in their group size: ideally, the introduction or removal of individuals does not cause a drastic change in the performance of the swarm. Scalability is enabled by local sensing and communication: provided that the introduction and removal of robots does not dramatically modify the density of the swarm, each individual robot will keep interacting with approximately the same number of peers, those that are in its sensing and communication range.

Finally, swarm robotics promotes the development of systems that are able to deal with a broad spectrum of environments and operating conditions. Flexibility is enabled by the distributed and self-organized nature of a robot swarm: in a swarm, robots dynamically allocate themselves to different tasks to match the requirements of the specific environment and operating conditions; moreover, robots operate on the basis of local sensing and communication and do not rely on pre-existing infrastructure or on any form of global information.

Potential applications of swarm robotics

The properties of swarm robotics systems make them appealing in several potential application domains.

The use of robots for tackling dangerous tasks is clearly appealing as it eliminates or reduces risks for humans. The dangerous nature of these tasks implies a high risk of losing robots. Therefore, a fault-tolerant approach is required, making dangerous tasks an ideal application domain for robot swarms. Example of dangerous tasks that could be tackled using robot swarms are demining, search and rescue, and cleaning up toxic spills.

Potential applications for robot swarms are those in which it is difficult or even impossible to estimate in advance the resources needed to accomplish the task. For instance, allocating resources to manage an oil leak can be very hard because it is often difficult to estimate the oil output and to foresee its temporal evolution. In these cases, a solution is needed that is scalable and flexible. A robot swarm could be an appealing solution: robots can be added or removed in time to provide the appropriate amount of resources and meet the requirements of the specific task. Example of tasks that might require an a priori unknown amount of resources is search and rescue, tracking, and cleaning.

Another potential application domain for swarm robotics are tasks that have to be accomplished in large or unstructured environments, in which there is no available infrastructure that can be used to control the robots—e.g., no available communication network or global localization system. Robot swarms could be employed for such applications because they are able to act autonomously without the need of any infrastructure or any form of external coordination. Examples of tasks in unstructured and large environments are underwater or extra-terrestrial planetary exploration, surveillance, demining, and search and rescue.

Some environments might change rapidly over time. For instance, in a post-earthquake situation, buildings might collapse thereby changing the layout of the environment and creating new hazards. In these cases, it is necessary to adopt solutions that are flexible and can react quickly to events. Swarm robotics could be used to develop flexible systems that can rapidly adapt to new operating conditions. Example of tasks in environments that change over time are patrolling, disaster recovery, and search and rescue.