Abstract
Swarm robotics is one of the most fascinating and new research areas of recent decades, and one of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of swarm robots that are self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on hardware architecture and several other important aspects of modular swarm robots, such as self-reconfigurability, self-replication, and self-assembly. The key factors in designing and building a group of swarm robots are cost and miniaturization with robustness, flexibility, and scalability. In robotics intelligence, self-assembly and self-reconfigurability are among the most important characteristics as they can add additional capabilities and functionality to swarm robots. Simulation and model design for swarm robotics is highly complex and expensive, especially when attempting to model the behavior of large swarm robot groups.
Highlights
An increasing number of research and development activities related to modular swarm robotics are attracting considerable attention and interest in industry and academia
Self-reconfiguration, selfassembly, and self-replication are the main distinguishing characteristics of swarm robots, and a dream long held by many researchers in the field of robotics is to develop fully autonomous robotic systems with these characteristics [2]
As with many new technologies, this field is growing rapidly and becoming more complex, but there remains much to accomplish in the development of swarm robotics intelligence and swarm robotics hardware since the performance of a swarm robotics system depends greatly on its mechanical and electronic control design [3]
Summary
An increasing number of research and development activities related to modular swarm robotics are attracting considerable attention and interest in industry and academia. Christensen, O’Grady, and Dorigo describe a robotic system that exhibits this kind of self-assembly In this system, the basic units are themselves robots that can function either independently when disconnected from one another, or can function collectively when connected together to form a metastructure. In self-reconfiguring, swarm modules are able to connect and disconnect without any human interaction as they offer such advantages as versatility, adaptability, robustness, and inexpensive production over traditional robots [6, 7] Due to these advantages, swarm robots exhibiting self-reconfigurability and self-assembly can be used to handle a wide range of tasks in an unknown or dynamic environment such as search and rescue operations after a fire or earthquake, undersea mining, planetary exploration, battlefield reconnaissance, and other application like service robotics and entertainment.
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