Algerian Democratic and Popular Republic

Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific

Research

Ghardaïa University

Faculty of Science and Technology

Department of Automation and Electromechanics
Specialty: Industrial maintenance

Theme:

Swarm Robotics

Prepared by: Supervision by:

HADJ AMAR Maria Ms: Nacer HACENE

University year: 2019/2020

 Content :
Introduction
1. What is swarm robotics?..............................................................4

2. Robots as a part of a Swarm…………………………………………..4

3. Swarm intelligence………………………………………….......5

4. Characteristics of Robot Swarm…………………………………………..6

5. Multi-Robotics Systems and SwarmRobotics…………………………….7

6. Advantages of Multi-Robotics Systems as compared to a Single

Robot……………………………………………………………………...7

7. Experimental Platforms in Swarm Robotics…………………………..….8

1) Robotic Platforms…………………………………8

2) Simulators…………………………………...12

8. Algorithms and Technique used for various tasks in Swarm

Robotics……………………………………………………..…13

9. Applications……………………………………………………16

10. Advantages and disadvantages swarm robotics. ……….17

Conclusion

References

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 Introduction
Interacting, understanding and then responding to the situation are some of the greatest
features of humans and those are the things which make us what we are. We are born to live
in a social society and we have always known about us that we are the most well-mannered
social creature known since the creation of this planet.

The social culture and interaction with each other to help for a common goal is not only found
in humans but also in other species of this planet like a flock of birds or fishes or bee's, all
they have a one thing in common that they are having a collective behavior. When the birds
migrate its often seen they are in a group which is led by the lead member of their group and
all are following them and their group are designed in a particular geometrical shapes despite
being the birds have no sense of the shapes and figures and also the group is made such that
the senior members of the group are on the boundaries while the young ones or the newborns
are in the center.

The same characteristics are found in fire ants, these ants are a bit different from other species
of the ants and are especially known for their group behavior, they build together, they eat
together and they defend their colonies from the preys together, basically they know they can
achieve more when they are in a group. A recent study was being conducted on the group
behavior of these ants in which it was found that they were capable of making strong
structures whenever needed, such as when needed to create a small bridge to crossover.

The collective behavior of these social animals and insect’s help's them to achieve more
despite all their constraints. Researchers have demonstrated that individuals of these groups
do not need any representation or sophisticated knowledge to produce such complex
behaviors. In social insects, animals and birds individuals are not informed about the global
status of the colony. The knowledge of the swarm is distributed throughout all the agents,
where an individual is not able to accomplish its task without the rest of the swarm. What if
this collective sensing can be brought into a group of Robots? This is what swarm robotics is
and we will learn about this in detail in this mini-project.

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 1. What is swarm robotics?
Given the plethora of terms being used for describing different approaches used
in multi-robot systems, such as “distributed robotics” or “collective robotis”, the
distinguishing characteristics of swarm robotics from the rest needs to be
clarified. a definition was provided as:

Definition : “Swarm robotics is the study of how a large number of relatively

simple physically embodied agents can be designed such that a desired
collective behavior emerges from the local interactions among the agents and
between the agents and the environment.

In a nutshell, swarm robotics (SR) is basically large number of robots

mimicking insects or animals that gather and act together as a collective such as
ants or bees.

2. Robots as a part of a Swarm:

Our environment in which we are living is very much inspiring for us, many of
us take inspiration for their work from nature and the environment, famous
inventors like the Leonardo da Vinci did it very well and can be seen in his
designs in today's world we are also making the same process work for us for
solving the design and engineering problems like the nose of bullet trains are
inspired from the beak of the kingfisher so that it has more speed and be more
energy efficient and produce relatively less noise as it passes through the tunnels
and there is term coined for this and its known as Biomimicry.

So to solve the complex tasks where human intervention is difficult and has
higher complexity of what needs to be more than just an average robot like
certain uses cases where a building is collapsed due to an earthquake and people
are depressed under the concrete, certainly this problem requires some kind of

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 robot which can run multiple tasks at once and small enough to make it through
the concrete and helps to get the information of human existence at the first
place, so what comes to your mind, a group of small robots that are small
enough and autonomously create their own way and get the information and it
certainly mimics the some kinda swarm of insects or flies and hence where the
swarm robotics comes into first place and here's the more formal one. Swarm
robotics is a field of multi-robotics in which a large number of robots are
coordinated in a distributed and a decentralized way. it's based upon the use of
local rules, small simple robots inspired by the collective behavior of social
insects so that a large number of simple robots can outperform a complex task in
a more efficient way than a single robot, giving robustness and flexibility to the
group.

figure 1: Swarm of Robotics Ants

3. swarm intelligence :
Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-
organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work
on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and
Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.[1]
SI systems consist typically of a population of simple agents or boids interacting
locally with one another and with their environment. The inspiration often
comes from nature, especially biological systems. The agents follow very simple
rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how
individual agents should behave, local, and to a certain degree random,
interactions between such agents lead to the emergence of "intelligent" global
behavior, unknown to the individual agents. Examples of swarm intelligence in
natural systems include ant colonies, bird flocking, hawks hunting,
animal herding, bacterial growth, fish schooling and microbial intelligence.
The application of swarm principles to robots is called swarm
robotics while swarm intelligence refers to the more general set of
algorithms. Swarm prediction has been used in the context of forecasting
problems. Similar approaches to those proposed for swarm robotics are

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 considered for genetically modified organisms in synthetic collective
intelligence.
4. Characteristics of Robot Swarm:

As said simple robotic swarm acquires a characteristic of social insects which

are listed as follows

1. The swarm of robots must be autonomous, and able to sense and act in real
environment.

2. The number of robots in a swarm must be large enough so as to back their

every single task as a group which they are required to perform.

3. There should be homogeneity in the swarm, there can be different groups in

the swarm but they should not be too many.

4. A single robot of the swarm must be incapable and inefficient with respect to
their main objective, that is, they need to collaborate in order to succeed and
improve the performance.

5. All the robots are necessitated to have only local sensing and communication
capabilities with neighboring partner of the swarm, this ensures the coordination
of the swarm is distributed and scalability becomes one of the properties of the
system.

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 5. Multi-Robotics Systems and Swarm Robotics

Swarm robotics is a part of the multi-robotic system and as a group, they have
some characteristics to their multiple axes that define their group behavior

Collective size: Collective size is the SIZE-INF which is N>>1 which is

opposite to the SIZE-LIM, where the number of robot’s N is smaller than their
respective environment size they are put in.

Communication range: Communication range is COM-NEAR, so that the

robots can only communicate with the robots which are close enough.

Communication topology: Communication topology for the robots in the

swarm would be generally TOP-GRAPH, robots are linked in a general graph
topology.

Communication bandwidth: Communication bandwidth is BAND-MOTION,

Communication cost between the two robots is the same as moving the robots
between locations.

Collective recounfigrability: Collective reconfigurability is generally ARR-

COMM, this is coordinated arrangement with the members that communicate,
but it also could be ARR-DYN, that is the dynamic arrangement, positions can
change randomly.

Process ability: Process ability is PROC-TME, where the computational model

is a tuning machine equivalent.

Collective composition: Collective composition is CMP-HOM, meaning that

robots are homogeneous.

6. Advantages of Multi-Robotics Systems as compared to a Single

Robot

▪ Task Parallelism: We all know the tasks could be decomposable, and we all
are aware of the agile development method, so by using parallelism, groups
can make to perform the task more efficiently.
▪ Task Enablement: A group is more powerful than a single one and the same
applies for the swarm robotics, where a group of robots can make task do
certain task that is impossible for a single robot
▪ Distribution in Sensing: As the swarm has a collective sensing so it has
wider range of sensing than the range of a single robot.

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 ▪ Distribution in Action: A group of robots can actuate different actions at
different places at the same time.
▪ Fault Tolerance: The failure of a single robot within a swarm of robots
within a group does not imply that the task is going to fail or cannot be
accomplished.

7. Experimental Platforms in Swarm Robotics:

There are different experimental platforms used for swarm robotics which
involves the use of the different experimental platforms and different robotic
simulators to stimulate the environment of swarm robotics without the actual
hardware needed.

1. Robotic Platforms:
Different robotic platforms are used in different swarm-robotic experiments in
different laboratories:

a) Swarmbot:

Sensors used: it has various sensors to help the bot out which includes range
sensors and camera.

Motion: It uses wheels for moving from one to another.

Developed by: It's developed by Rice University, USA

Description: SwarmBot is a swarm robotic platform developed for research by

Rice University. It can autonomously work for approximate of 3 hours of a
single charge, also these bots are self-enabled to find and dock themselves to
charging stations placed on walls.

Swarmbot

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 b) Kobot:

Sensors used: It involves the use of the distance sensor, vision sensors and
compass.

Motion: It uses wheels for their motion

Developed by: It's developed in the KOVAN Research Lab at Middle East
Technical University, Turkey.

Description: Kobot is specifically designed for the research in swarm robotics.

It is made of several sensors that make it a perfect platform for performing
various swarm robotic situations such as coordinated motion. It has can work
autonomously for 10 hours on a single charge. It also includes a replaceable
battery which is to be recharged manually and It is mostly been used in the
implementation of self-organizing scenario.

c) S-bot :
Sensors used: It makes the use of various sensor to get the things to work like
sensors for light, IR, position, force, speed, temp, humidity, acceleration, and a
mic.

Motion: It makes the use of treels attached to its base for its movements.

Developed by: It's developed by the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

(EPFL), Switzerland.

Description: S-bot is one of the several competent and substantial swarm

robotic platforms ever built. it has a unique gripper design capable of gripping

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 objects and other s-bots. Also, they can approximately work out for 1 hour on a
single charge.

S-Bot
d) Jasmine Robot:

Sensors used: It makes use of distance and light sensors.

Developed by: It's developed by the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Motion: It makes its movement on the wheels.

Description: Jasmine mobile robots is a swarm robotic platforms which is used

in many swarm robotic research.

Jasmine Robot

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 e) E-Puck:

Sensors used: It uses a variety of sensors like distance, camera, bearing,

acceleration, and a mic.

Developed by: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

Motion: It's based on the wheel motion.

Description: E-puck is primarily designed for educational purposes and is one

of the most successful robots. However, due to its simplicity, it is often
employed in swarm robotics research as well. It has user replaceable batteries
with a working time of 2-4 hours.

E-Puck

f) Kilobot:

Sensors used: It uses a combination of distance and light sensors.

Developed by: Harvard University, USA

Motion: It uses vibrations of the system for the movement of the system's body.

Description: Kilobot is a moderately recent swarm robotic platform with a

unique function of group charging and group programming. Due to its simplicity
and low power consumption, it has an uptime of up to 24 hours. Robots are
charged manually in groups in a special charging station.

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 Kilobot by Harvard University

2. Simulators:
Robotic simulators solve the problem of the hardware needed for the job of
testing the credibility of the bots in the artificially simulated real environment
parameters.

There exist many robotic simulators which can be used for multi-robotic
experiments, and more specifically for the swarm robotic experiments and all of
them differ in their technical aspects but also in the license and the cost. Some of
the simulators for the swarm bots and Multi-robotic platforms are as follows:

▪ SwarmBot3D: SwarmBot3D is a simulator for the multi-robotics but

designed specifically for the S-Bot robot of the SwarmBot project.
▪ Microsoft Robotics Studio: The robotic studio is a simulator developed by
Microsoft. It allows multi-robotic simulation and requires the Windows
platform to run.
▪ Webots: Webots is a realistic mobile simulator that allows multi-robot
simulations, with already built models of the real robots. It can simulate real
collisions by applying the physics of the real world. However, its
performance decreases when working with more than robots making
simulations with a large number of robots difficult.
▪ Player/stage/Gazebo: Player/stage/Gazebo is an open source simulator with
multi-robotic capabilities and a wide set of available robots and sensors
ready for use. It can well handle the simulations of the swarm-robotic
experiments in a 2D environment with very good results. The population size
in the environment can scale up to 1000 simple robots in a real time.

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 8. Algorithms and Technique used for various tasks in
Swarm Robotics

Here we are going to explore the various techniques used in swarm robotics for
various simple tasks such as aggregation, dispersion etc. These tasks are the
basic initial steps for all the high end working in swarm robotics.

Aggregation: Aggregation is getting all the bots together and it’s really
important and initial step in other complex steps such as pattern formation, self-
assembly, exchange information and collective movements. A robot uses its
sensors such as proximity sensors and microphone which uses sound exchange
mechanisms with the help of the actuator such as speakers. The sensors helps a
single bot to find the nearest robot which also turns out to be the center of the
group, where the bot has to concentrate solely on the other bot which is at the
center of the group and reach towards it and the same process is followed by all
the members of the swarm which let them aggregate all.

Dispersion: When the robots are aggregated at a single place then the next step
is to disperse them in the environment where they work as a single constitute
member of the swarm and this also helps in the exploration of the environment
each bot of the swarm work out as a single sensor when it is left to explore.
Various algorithms have been proposed and used for the dispersion of the
robots, one of the approaches includes the potential field algorithm for the
dispersion of the robots in which the robots get repel by the obstacles and other
robots which allow the swarm environment to disperse linearly.

One of the other approaches involves dispersion based on reading the wireless
intensity signals, wireless intensity signals allows the robots to disperse without
the knowledge of their nearest neighbors they just catch the wireless intensities
and arrange them in order to disperse them in the surrounding environment.

Formation of Patterns: Formation of patterns in swarm robotics is a major

characteristic of their collective behavior, these patterns can be very much
helping when a problem is to be solved which involves the whole group works
together. In pattern formation, bots create a global shape by changing the portion
of the individual robots where each bot has just local information.

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 A swarm of robots forms a structure with an internal and external defined shape.
The rules that make the particle/robots to aggregate in the desired formation are
local, but a global shape emerges, without having any global information with
respect to an individual member of the swarm. The algorithm uses virtual
springs between the neighboring particles, taking into consideration how many
neighbors they have.

Collective movement: What's the meaning of a team if they all can't work out
the problem together and that's the best part of a swarm? Collective movement is
a way of letting to coordinate a group of robots and making them move together
as a group in a cohesive way. It’s a basic way of making some collective tasks
done and can be classified into two types formation and flocking.

There are many methods of collective movement but only those allowing
scalability with a growing number of robots are of concern where each robot
recognizes the relative position of its neighbor and react with respective forces
which could be attractive or repulsive to form structures for collective
movements.

Allocating tasks: Task Allocation is a problematical area in swarm robotics on

the basis of labor division. However, there are various methods used for the
labor division, one of them is that each robot would keep an observation on
other robot’s tasks and maintains the history for the same and later then can
change its own behavior to get fit itself in the task, this method is based on
gossip communication and surely it has its pros of better performance but at the
same time it has a con that due to limited robustness and packet loss during
communication it comes out to be less scalable. In the other method, tasks are
announced by some of the robots and a certain number of other robots attend
them simultaneously, it's a simple and reactive method.

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 Searching of a source: Swarm robotics is very much successful in the task of
the source searching, especially when the source for the searching is complex as
in case of sound or odor. The searching by the swarm robotics is done in two
ways one is global other is local, and the difference between the two is the
communication. One with the global communication among the robots in which
the robots are able to find the global maximum source. The other one is
restricted to only local communication between the robots to find the local
maxima.

Transporting of objects: The ants have collective transportation of objects

where an individual ant waits for the other mate for the cooperation if the object
to be transported is too heavy. Under the same light robots, the swarm makes the
things work out in the same way where each robot has the advantage of getting
cooperation from the other robots for transporting the objects. S-bots offers a
great platform for solving the problem of transportation where they self-
assemble to cooperate and their algorithm scales up if the object to be
transported to be is heavy.

The other method is the collective transportation of objects where the objects are
collected and stored for later transportation, here the robots have two different
tasks - collecting the objects and placing them in a cart, and collectively move
the cart carrying those objects.

Collective Mapping: Collective mapping is used for the exploration and

mapping of the big indoor areas using a large number of robots.

In one method the mapping is carried out by the two group of two robots, which
exchange information to merge the maps. The other method is role based in
which the robot can assume any of the two roles which are moving or landmark
that they can exchange for the movement of the swarm. Also, the robots have a
certain estimate of their position so have to an estimate of the location of the
other robots so as to build a collective map.

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 9. Applications:
• Swarm robots have many applications .Disaster rescue missions is one of
the most important applications of swarms robots.
• Swarms of robots of could be sent to places rescue workers can't reach
this would save lives.
• Swarm robots have many applications in mining tasks Swarms robots can
be used in military to form an autonomous army.
• Swarm robots are also useful for autonomous surveillance and
environment monitoring to investigate environmental parameters, search
for survivors, and locate sources of hazards such as Chemical or gas
spills, toxic pollution, pipe leaks, radioactivity. Swarm robots can perform
tasks in which the main goal is to cover a wide region.
• The robots can disperse and perform monitoring tasks, for example, in
forests. It can be useful for detecting hazardous events, like a leakage of a
chemical substance.
• In Military applications, it is very much useful in detecting bomb which is
most dangerous task for the humans.
• Robotics is expected to play a major role in the agricultural/farming
domain.
• Swarm robotics, in particular, is considered extremely relevant for
precision farming and large-scale agricultural applications.. Specifically, a
decentralised monitoring/mapping scenario, and implement a use case for
the detection and mapping of weeds in a field by a group of small
unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs).
• Toxic waste clean-up, search and rescue (SAR) and collection of terrain
samples are some of the important applications of Swarms robots.
• Swarms robots can be for Exploration and mapping it would save Money
and time.
• Presently, most of the efforts are being made in surveillance,
reconnaissance and hazard detection.
• In medical fields, a use of nano-robots moving through human veins and
arteries (e.g. To fight certain types of cancer).
• There are many industries which use dangerous things like burning
furnace, chemicals, making nuclear weapons etc. Here usage of swarms
can reduce danger in such types of industries. The possible real
applications of swarm robotics will take special importance when robots
get to be mass produced and the costs of building swarms of robots
decrease.
• The development of technologies such as MEMS (Micro-
electromechanical Systems) will allow to create small and cheap robots.

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 • In this way swarms of robots can be really useful for dangerous tasks. For
example, for mining detection and cleaning.
• The number of possible applications is really promising, but still the
technology must firstly be developed both in the algorithmic and
modelling part, and also in the miniaturisation technologies.

10. Advantages and disadvantages swarm robotics :

➢ Advantages:

(i) Improved performance: if tasks can be decomposable then by using

parallelism, groups can make tasks to be performed more efficiently.

(ii) Task enablement: groups of robots can do certain tasks that are impossible
for a single robot.

(iii) Distributed sensing: the range of sensing of a group of robots is wider than
the range of a single robot.

➢ Disadvantages:

(i) Interference: robots in a group can interfere between them, due tocollisions,
occlusions, and so forth.

(ii) Uncertainty concerning other robots‟ intentions: coordination requires

knowing what other robots are doing.

If this is not clear robots can compete instead of cooperate.

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 Conclusion
This work has given the detailed overview of swarm robotics. Swarm robotics is
an interesting alternative to classical approaches to robotics because of some
properties of problem solving by social in-sects, which is fl xible, robust,
decentralized and self organized. Advantages of swarm-based robotics are
numer-ous. Some tasks may be too complex for a single robotto perform. The
speed is increased when using sev-eral robots and it is easier to design a robot
due toits simplicity. Rapid progress of hardware brings in-novations in robot
design allowing further minimiza-tion. The communication between robots is
reduced,because of the interactions through the environment .We are reaching a
stage in technology where itis no longer possible to use traditional, centralized,
hierarchical command and control techniques to deal with systems that have
thousands or even millions of dynamically changing, communicating, and
heterogeneous entities. The type of solution swarm robotic soffers, and swarm
intelligence in general, is the only way of moving forward when it comes to
control of complex distributed systems.

As described above Swarm robotics is more flexible than other robotic system.
For efficient working optimal solution for the problems is required which swarm
robotics easily full-fill with ease. Since Swarm robotics can acclimate to any
environment, it can be used with very few or none limitations.

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 References :
➢ Site :

• https://circuitdigest.com/article/introduction-to-swarm-robotics

• Wikipedia .

➢ Book : Swarm Intelligence.

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