This presentation is about swarm robotics its existence and where it is used.

2. What is Swarm Robotics?
 Yet another novel approach to the control of large
group of robots!
 Study of multi-robot coordination strategies inspired
from social insects.
 Engineering self-organization in physically embodied
swarms.
 Application of Swarm Intelligence to the control of a
group of robots.

3. What’s novel and desirable in the
Swarm Robotics approach?
 Emphasis on the system-level functioning properties
observed in social insect systems:
 Robustness
 Flexibility
 Scalability
 Essential for deploying large numbers of robots.

4. Robustness
 Social insects can continue to operate despite large
disturbances.
 Redundancy
 Decentralized coordination
 Simplicity of the individuals
 Distributed sensing

5. Flexibility
 Social insects can offer modularized solutions to tasks
of different nature by utilizing different coordination
mechanisms.

6. Flexibility – same swarm, different
tasks
 Foraging
 Prey retrieval
 Chain formation

7. Scalability
 Social insects are observed to be able to operate under
a wide range of group sizes. That is, coordination
mechanisms are rather independent of the number of
individuals in the group.

8. Finally… a definition
 Swarm robotics is the study of how large number of
relatively simple physically embodied agents can be
designed such that a desired collective behavior emerges
from the local interactions among agents and between the
agents and the environment.

9. Criteria for Swarm Robotic systems
 A swarm robotic system should consist of
 large numbers of robots,
 few homogeneous groups of robots,
 robots that are relatively incapable or inefficient,
 robots with only local sensing and communication
abilities.

10. 0 - Individuals should be robots!
 Individuals should be autonomous robots.
 Individuals should
 be situated and autonomous
 be able to physically interact
 Mobility of individuals is sufficient, but not required.
 Metamorphic robotic systems?
 Yes
 Sensor networks?
 No

11. 1 - Large number of robots
 The study should be relevant for the coordination of
large numbers of robots.
 Why relevancy?
 How large is “large”?

12. 2 - Few homogeneous groups of
robots
 The robotic system should consist of few
homogeneous groups and that the number of robots in
each group should be large.
 Teams are not swarms.
 Hierarchical robotic systems (for instance swarms with
a “designated queen”) are less `swarm robotic’.
 What’s a homogeneous group?
 How about individual adaptation?

13. 3 - Relatively incapable of
inefficient robots
 The robotic system should utilize relatively incapable or
inefficient robots with respect to the task at hand.
 The robots should have difficulties in carrying the task on their
own.
 The deployment of a group of robots should improve the
performance of system.
 The deployment of a group of robots should improve the robustness
of the system.

14. 4 - Robots with only local sensing
and communication abilities
 For coordinating their actions, the robots should
utilize only local sensing and communication
capabilities.
 Locality promotes scalability.
 Existence of global communication channels not used
for coordination among the robots does not violate.

15. Sources of inspiration
 Self-organizing natural systems
 Social insect systems: ants, termites, wasps, bees,
cockroaches, locusts…
 Animals with social behaviors: penguins, birds, fish,
sheep...
 Unicellular organisms: Amoebae, bacteria, viruses…
 Artificial self-organizing systems
 Self-assembly of materials

16. Aggregation of amoebae into slime
mould
 When food is abundant,
amoebae (D. discoideum)
acts independently of
others, feeding and
multiplying (Bonner;1967,
Goldbeter;1996).
 When food supply is
depleted amoebae release
cAMP ( a chemo-attractant
for amoeba) into the extra-
cellular environment.
 Amoebae aggregate
forming a slug, a multi-
cellular organism which
can move and sporulate.
Summarized from Self-Organization in Biological
Systems by Scott Camazine, Jean-Louis
Deneubourg, Nigel R. Franks, James Sneyd,
Guy Theraulaz, and Eric Bonabeau

17. Quorum sensing in bacteria
 Bacteria seem to have
interesting communication
mechanisms to increase their
survival.
 V. fischeri produces light
when its population reach a
critical size.
 V. cholarae delays the
production of virulence factor
until they reach a certain
mass, to ensure a successful
infection against the
infection system.
 Recent studies show that
bacteria use certain auto-
inducers to detect their
density in the environment.
B.L. Bassler, How bacteria talk
to each other: regulation of
gene expression by
quorum sensing. Current
Opinions in Microbiology
1999 Dec;2(6):582-7.

18. Information exchange in bacteria
 Bacterial colonies can be more resistant to antibiotics than
bacteria living in suspension!
 Hypothesis: Bacteria form a “genomic web” communicating
with each other:
 Inducive communication: a chemical signal triggers a certain action
in other bacteria.
 Informative communication: the message received is interpreted by
the cell, and its response is determined by its history as well as its
current state.

19. Self-assembly
 Self-assembly: self-organization by making physical bond formation
 Individuals lose some of their motility. This creates some interesting
dynamics. Social insects and breakable bonds in chemistry
 Self-assembly of materials is described as the “autonomous
organization of components into patterns or structures without
[external] intervention.” Whitesides and Grzybowski (Science; 2002)
 Self-assembly is a promising method for fabricating regular structures:
nano-scale self-assembly is promising for building large numbers of
micro- electro-mechanical systems (MEMS), improving the robotic
assembly processes.
19/29

20. Domain Of Application
 Following are some applications of Swarm Robotics:
 1.Tasks that are too dangerous
 2.Tasks that cover a region
 3.Tasks that scale up or scale down in Time
 4.Tasks that require redundandcy

21. Conclusion
 Swarm robotics as a new approach to the control and
coordination of multi robot systems.
 It is supposed that a desired collective behavior
emerges from the interactions between the robots and
interactions of robots with the environment.
 The research of swarm robotics is to study the design
of robots, their physical body and their controlling
behavior.