Swarm robotics - Scholarpedia

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 behavior 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.