A manufacturing workcell model employs behavior-based swarm robots whose emergent behavior successfully performs the workcell’s required materials handling without central planning. Swarm robots are groups of autonomous mobile robots whose sensory-driven state behavior produces emergent group functionality not characteristic of the individual robots. Processing machines within the workcell broa...

Swarms of robots have several military and civilian applications such as search and rescue missions, terrain exploration, industrial control, public security, fire combat, and several others. One of the biggest challenges of cooperative swarming in such application domains is the real-time coordination of the robot's movements in a wide-area setting, where it is expensive, or even impossible, t...

Currently light infantry soldiers do not have access to many of their cyber resources the moment they depart the forward operating base (FOB). Commanders with recent combat experience have reported on the dearth of computing abilities once a mission is underway [17]. To address this, our group seeks to develop a tactical, mobile cloud implemented on a swarm of semi-autonomous robots. In this pa...

This paper examines the problem of giving very simple swarm robots the capability of recognizing and locating other swarm members. The ability to recognize conspecific robots will allow swarms of robots to adjust their mutual separation as required by any specific task. For instance, robots engaging in flocking behavior will need to maintain a fixed mutual separation. One of the perceived benef...

We present a new robotic concept, called SWARM-BOT, based on a swarm of small and simple autonomous mobile robots called S-BOTs. S-BOTs have a particular assembling capability that allows them to connect physically to other S-BOTs and form a bigger robot entity, the SWARM-BOT. A SWARM-BOT is typically composed by 10 to 30 S-BOTs physically interconnected. S-BOTs can autonomously assemble into a...

Inspired by social animals, such as ants, bees and fish, which appear to exhibit what has been dubbed ‘swarm intelligence’, swarm robotic systems aim to accomplish goals that are unachievable by an individual robot. Swarm robotics have a large number of potential uses, including applications in the military, monitoring, disaster relief, healthcare and commercial applications. To be able to achi...

A swarm is a decentralized and selforganized collective with lots of simple but autonomous and homogeneous individuals. Swarm intelligence is defined to describe its emergent behaviors. Both Sensor networks and mobile multi-robots can have swarm features. The combination and cooperation of these two systems is a tendency recently. From the view of swarm organisms, the challenges of combination ...