Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of relatively simple physical robots. The goal of this approach is to study the design of robots (both their physical body and their controlling behaviors) such that a desired collective behavior emerges from the inter-robot interactions and the interactions of the robots with the environment, inspired but not limited by the emergent behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. It has been discovered that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors. Robots is a computer-animated movie released March 11, 2005. ... Behavior (or behaviour in Commonwealth English) refers to the actions or reactions of an object or organism, usually in relation to the environment. ... Collective behavior is a specialized term in sociology. ... Emergence is the process of deriving some new and coherent structures, patterns and properties in a complex system. ... Eusociality is the phenomenon of reproductive specialisation found in some species of animal, whereby a specialised caste carries out reproduction in a colony of non-reproductive animals. ... Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised, systems. ...

Unlike distributed robotic systems in general, swarm robotics emphasises large number of robots, and promotes scalability, for instance, by using only local communication. Local communication is usually achieved by wireless transmission systems, using radio frequency or infrared communication. In telecommunications and software engineering, scalability indicates the capability of a system to increase total througput under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added. ... Wireless is an old-fashioned term for a radio receiver, referring to its use as a wireless telegraph; now the term is used to describe modern wireless connections such as in cellular networks and wireless broadband Internet. ... Rough plot of Earths atmospheric transmittance (or opacity) to various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves. ... Image of a small dog taken in mid-infrared (thermal) light (false color) Infrared (IR) radiation is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength longer than that of visible light, but shorter than that of microwave radiation. ...

Potential application for swarm robotics include tasks that demand for extreme miniaturization (nanorobotics, microbotics), on the one hand, as for instance distributed sensing tasks in micromachinery or the human body. On the other hand, swarm robotics is suited to tasks that demand for extremely cheap designs, for instance a mining task, or an agricultural foraging task. Miniaturization is a continuing trend in technology toward ever-smaller scales for first mechanical, then optical and most recently electronic devices. ... Nanorobotics is the technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a millionth of a millimetre (10-9 metres). ... Microbotics (or micro robotics) is the field of miniature robotics, in particular mobile robots with characteristic dimensions less than 1 mm. ... Micromachines are mechanical objects that are fabricated in the same general manner as integrated circuits. ... Human anatomy or anthropotomy is a special field within anatomy. ... The El Chino Mine located near Silver City, New Mexico is an open-pit copper mine This article is about mineral extraction. ... Foraging just means looking for food (or, metaphorically, anything else). ...

Both, miniaturization and cost, are hard constraints that emphasize simplicity of the individual team member, and thus motivate a swarm-intelligent approach to achieve meaningful behavior on swarm-level.

Further research is needed to find methodologies that allow for designing, and reliably predicting, swarm behavior, only given features of the individual swarm member.

See also

• Behavior-based robotics
• Nanorobotics
• Microbot
• Multi-agent systems
• Swarm intelligence
• Autonomous agents

Behavior-based robotics or behavioral robotics or behavioural robotics is the branch of robotics that does not use an internal model of the environment. ... Nanorobotics is the technology of creating machines or robots at or close to the scale of a millionth of a millimetre (10-9 metres). ... Microbotics is the techno-science for microbots. ... In computer science, a multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of several agents, capable of mutual interaction. ... Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behaviour in decentralised, self-organised, systems. ... An autonomous agent is a system situated in, and part of, an environment, which senses that environment, and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda. ...

External links

• Swarm-Robotics.org
• Didabots. Collective emergent robotics/swarm robotics example, with an on-line video of an experiment with four robots.
• The Swarm-bots project.
• Idaho National Laboratory Swarm Robotics