Review of methodologies and tasks in swarm robotics towards standardization

Abstract

Swarm Robotics (SR) is an extension of the study of Multi-Robot Systems that exploits concepts of communication, coordination and collaboration among a large number of robots. The massive parallelization yielded by the robots working together can make a task faster than in the case of the usage of a single complex robot. One of the main aspects in robotic swarms is that the control is decentralized by definition and distributed among the robots of the swarm, improving the system robustness and fault-tolerance. Furthermore, this characteristic often allows the emergence of collective behaviors from the robot's interaction with each other and with the environment through their embodied sensors and actuators. In most cases, the number of inputs from sensor readings turns analytical solutions hard or even impossible. Thus, many ad-hoc approaches are contributed to deal with the situation at hand. The main goal of this review is to find out, through the study of existing research works of the field, the reason behind the lack of exploitation of swarm robotic systems in real-world applications. For this purpose, we first review the different possibilities of study in SR: physical and simulated robotic platforms, development methodologies and the variety of basic tasks and collective behaviors. We then briefly describe some fields related do SR that have a big impact on the development of SR. After that, based on existing taxonomies found in literature, we categorize existing research works regarding SR in two large main groups: those that deal with SR design and those that deal with tasks as required in SR. The review of both existing robots and techniques in the literature show a diversity of approaches to discuss SR issues. Nonetheless, it is easily noticeable from these works that there is a clamant absence of solid real-world applications of SR. An analysis of the interests and bottlenecks of this field indicates that the number of research works is smaller than those in other related areas. This suggests that, even though with many research studies, the field of SR is not yet mature enough, mainly due the absence of a universal methodology and generic robots that can be used in any, or at least in many, applications. Thus, we emphasize, discuss and analyze the urgent need for standardization of many aspects in SR, including hardware and software, as to allow a possible flourishing of SR applicability to real-world applications. This standardization could accelerate a great deal the field of SR, thus facilitating the development of SR solutions for applications that impact our daily life.