Swarm Robotics

Swarm robotics is based on the natural swarms of social animals, such as insects, birds, and fish. These animals exhibit intelligent behaviours which allow them to cooperate and accomplish a common goal much faster and to a higher quality than if each individual worked alone. Swarm behaviour has been incorporated into robots to try mimic the benefits seen in the hopes it can aid in tackling real world issues. As swarm intelligence improves, greater automated capabilities could be produced.

What is Swarm Robotics

Swarm robotics is the study of how groups of simple robots coordinate. The collective behaviour of these groups is a consequence of interactions between the environment and each other. Swarm robotics is related to swarm intelligence, which is a branch of artificial intelligence that is inspired by the behaviour and intelligence of social animals. In a group, each member has rules and tasks that have been assigned, which produce a set of complex behaviours where interactions between each other create communication and constant feedback. A fundamental feature of this system is that there is no central control, instead it is based on local communication allowing its members to adapt in accordance with their environment.

Swarm Robotic traits

Key characteristics from the collective behaviour of social insects and animals displayed in natural swarms such as decentralisation, self-organisation, and cooperation are replicated within swarm robots. These characteristics are the reason why natural swarms are able to be as successful and efficient as they are. Mimicking these will allow swarm robots to be as successful as natural swarms social insects and animals frequently exhibit decentralised decision-making processes, in which individual members of the group may make decisions based on local information such as a change in their surroundings. Swarm robotic systems, on the other hand, employ this characteristic to communicate with other robots in order to achieve a common goal. Self-organization refers to the ability of social insects and animals to organise themselves into groups without centralised control. Swarm robots have adopted this trait to self-organize into groups based on local interactions and basic rules. Robots, for example, may use sensors to detect the presence of other robots and alter their behaviour appropriately. The capacity of natural swarms to adjust and adapt their behaviour in response to an obstacle in their changing environment. Cooperation is an essential quality in natural swarms that permits tasks and objectives to be accomplished, like as obtaining food or building a hive. Similarly, swarm robots rely on one another for cooperation. This might be displayed by sharing information, coordinating their movements, or assigning responsibilities to one another.

Applications

Swarm robotics has a wide range of potential applications that can be used. Here are some include:

• Agriculture: Swarm robots can be used to automate tasks like planting, harvesting, and crop monitoring. This area of application offers promising possibilities. They can cooperate to cover large areas quickly and efficiently.
• Search and rescue: Swarm robots can rapidly cover a large area, which makes them very useful for finding survivors of natural disasters in a short amount of time. Also they can be equipped with cameras and sensors which they can use to scan an area from a distance and send information back to the rescue team.
• Mining: Swarm robots may need more advanced skills for this application because they will be expected to carry out duties like mapping, excavating, and transporting materials. Swarm robots can complete these tasks effectively even in harsh and hazardous environments where human workers might struggle or be injured in.
• Military: Swarm robotics can be applied to a variety of military tasks, including target monitoring, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
• Medical field: Swarms of micro-robots could be used to carry drugs, genes or other substances to specific sites inside the body, where the micro-robots are injected or consumed by the patient. This possibility could bring an alternative way of how patients are treated by allowing doctors and medical professionals to access the insides of the body without invasive procedures.

Overall, the potential applications of swarm robotics are vast and diverse, and the technology is still in the early stages of development. As technology advances, we can expect to see even more applications in various industries.

Swarm Robots vs Single Robot

Advantages:

As swarm robotics focuses on the coordination of large groups of simple robots, there comes a lot of advantages over the traditional robot. Firstly, swarm robots are very robust. This is a result of how they are designed to work together. Swarm robots will continue to function efficiently even when individual robots in the swarm fail or are removed from the system. Secondly, adaptability is a trait that advantages swarm robots over traditional ones. This trait allows them to respond to and adapt to changes in their surroundings while still completing their jobs. Swarm robots are highly scalable as individuals can be added or taken away depending on the situation while still retaining its function to a high standard. By increasing the individuals of the swarm, it can also increase the capabilities of it, making it possible to perform tasks a singular robot would struggle at. Swarm robots are very efficient compared to traditional robots as they have the ability to work together to complete a task quicker and maybe to a higher standard. Swarm robots are also very inexpensive to maintain and produce as they are quite simple robots. This makes them quite desirable to use instead of using one traditional robot as its maintenance and the robot itself can be costly and undesirable.

A group of completely independent robots, rather than a single robot, to be more effective as more land/area can be covered. Therefore swarm robots are able to be more beneficial in tasks that include searching and covering area.

Below is a visual demo that demonstrates the rate at which both the swarm of robots(red circles) and a singular robot(blue circles) can cover in the same surface area. It can be seen that many robots can cover more area than the singular robot due to its strength in number. The speed of the robots can be changed by using the slider.

swarm robots vs single robot

Speed:

(if the video below isn't loading the same demo can be found through either through the demo link or the youtube video link).

Youtube video link

Link to demo