SEMINAR REPORT

ON

SWARM ROBOTICS

Submitted in the partial fulfilment of the requirements in degree

Of
Bachelor of Technology
In
Electronics and Communication Engineering
At

Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology

Janakpuri, New Delhi, Delhi-110058

Submitted by :

ANKIT RAJ
ECE-1
00715002816
 LIST OF TABLE

TITLE
Acknowledgement
Candidate’s declaration

1. INTRODUCTION
1.1. Definition
1.2. Main Characteristics
2. WORKING AND NEED
3. BLOCK DIAGRAM
4. GOALS
5. APPLICATIONS
6. ACHIEVEMENTS
6.1. Off-Line Methods
6.2. On-Line Methods
7. CHALLENGES
8. CURRENT RESEARCH
8.1. Design
8.2. Analysis
8.3. Collective Behaviours
9. CONCLUSION
10. FUTURE SCOPE
11. REFERENCES
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I am extremely thankful to Dr. Puneet Azad, Head of Department,

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, for
permitting me to undertake this work.

I express my heartfelt gratitude to my respected Seminar guide Mrs.

Preeti Sehrawat for her kind and inspiring advise which helped me to
understand the subject and its semantic significance. She enriched me
with valuable suggestions regarding my topic and presentation issues.

I am also very thankful to my parents and my friends for their

constant encouragement without which this assignment would not be
possible.
 CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION

I, Ankit Raj, Roll No. 00715002816 B.tech(semester 7th of the

Maharaja Surajmal Institute Of Technology, New Delhi) hereby
declare that the seminar report entitled ’Swarm Robotics’ is an
original work and data provided in the study is authentic to the best of
my knowledge. This report has not been submitted to any other
institute for the award of any other degree.

Ankit

Place: MSIT, GGSIPU

Roll no.: 00715002816

Date: October, 2019

 INTRODUCTION
Swarm robotics is the study of how to coordinate large groups of relatively
simple robots through the use of local rules. It takes its inspiration from societies
of insects that can perform tasks that are beyond the capabilities of the
individuals. 

Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a

system which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is
supposed that a desired collective behaviour emerges from the interactions
between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This
approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the
biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm
behaviour occurs.

1.1 DEFINITION
The research of swarm robotics is to study the design of robots, their physical
body and their controlling behaviours. It is inspired but not limited
by the emergent behaviour observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence.
Relatively simple individual rules can produce a large set of complex swarm
behaviours. A key-component is the communication between the members of
the group that build a system of constant feedback. The swarm behaviour
involves constant change of individuals in cooperation with others, as well as the
behaviour of the whole group.
Unlike distributed robotic systems in general, swarm robotics emphasizes
a large number of robots, and promotes scalability, for instance by using only
local communication. That local communication for example can be achieved
by wireless transmission systems, like radio frequency or infrared.

1.2 MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

The definition is complemented with a set of criteria in order to have a better
understanding and be able to differentiate it from other multi-robot types of
systems.
● The robots of the swarm must be autonomous robots, able to sense and
actuate in a real environment.
 ● The number of robots in the swarm must be large or at least the control
rules allow it.
● Robots must be homogeneous. There can exist different types of robots in
the swarm, but these groups must not be too many.
● The robots must be incapable or inefficient respect to the main task they
have to solve, this is, they need to collaborate in order to succeed or to
improve the performance.
● Robots have only local communication and sensing capabilities. It ensures
the coordination is distributed, so scalability becomes one of the
properties of the system.

WORKING AND NEED

Swarm intelligence is the observation that intelligent-seeming behaviour can
emerge from complex systems that are composed of simple "non-intelligent"
agents. In this the transistors are able to perform advanced, precise math at high
speed when working together.

To make a "swarm" of independent agents operate as an "intelligent" whole,

some additional features are required of the agents:

1. They need to behave consistently and interchangeably. This is achieved

in nature by having the agents come from the same genetic makeup
with identical or compatible pre-wired behaviours.

2. Certain behaviours or agents need to be geared toward keeping the

collective together. If the collective disperses, it stops functioning as a
whole.

3. There needs to be communication mechanics and individual state at the

agent level.
BLOCK DIAGRAM
 GOALS
Miniaturization and cost are key factors in swarm robotics. These are the
constraints in building large groups of robots; therefore the simplicity of the
individual team member should be emphasized. This should motivate a
swarm-intelligent approach to achieve meaningful behaviour at swarm-level,
instead of the individual level.
Much research has been directed at this goal of simplicity at the individual robot
level. Being able to use actual hardware in research of Swarm Robotics rather
than simulations allows researchers to encounter and resolve many more issues
and broaden the scope of Swarm Research. Thus, development of simple robots
for Swarm intelligence research is a very important aspect of the field. The goals
include keeping the cost of individual robots low to allow scalability, making
each member of the swarm less demanding of resources and more
power/energy efficient.

APPLICATIONS
Potential applications for swarm robotics are many. They include tasks that
demand miniaturization (nanorobotics, micro-robotics), like distributed sensing
tasks in micromachinery or the human body. One of the most promising uses of
swarm robotics is in disaster rescue missions. Swarms of robots of different sizes
could be sent to places rescue workers can't reach safely, to detect the presence
of life via infra-red sensors. On the other hand, swarm robotics can be suited to
tasks that demand cheap designs, for instance mining or
agricultural foraging tasks.

Another large set of applications may be solved using swarms of micro air
vehicles, which are also broadly investigated nowadays. In comparison with the
pioneering studies of swarms of flying robots using precise motion
capture systems in laboratory conditions, current systems such as Shooting
Star can control teams of hundreds of micro aerial vehicles in outdoor
environment using GNSS systems (such as GPS) or even stabilize them using
on-board localization systems where GPS is unavailable.
One such swarm system is the LIBOT Robotic System that involves a low cost
robot built for outdoor swarm robotics. The robots are also made with
provisions for indoor use via Wi-Fi, since the GPS sensors provide poor
communication inside buildings.

ACHIEVEMENTS
In automatic design, the problem of designing the control software is cast into
an optimization problem. In other terms, an automatic design method uses an
optimization algorithm to search the design space. This space comprises all the
instances of control software that the method can possibly produce. The goal of
the optimization algorithm is to find an instance of control software that
maximizes an appropriate performance measure. Automatic design methods can
be divided into two classes: off-line and on-line methods.

6.1 OFF-LINE METHODS

In off-line methods, the design process takes place in a preliminary, dedicated
phase: the design phase. The design phase occurs and terminates before the
robot swarm is deployed in its operational environment. Within the design
process, an off-line method evaluates a relatively large number of different
instances of control software. Typically, the evaluation of an instance of control
software is performed via a computer-based simulation. Simulation offers two
main benefits:

● It enables a faster-than-real-time evaluation.

● Prevents the robots from being damaged by a possibly low-quality
instance of the control software.

6.2 ON-LINE METHODS

In on-line methods, the design process takes place when the robot swarm has
been already deployed in its operational environment. The apparent advantage
of on-line methods over off-line methods is that on-line methods can benefit
from the availability of information on the actual operational environment that
would be unavailable at off-line design time. Moreover, one could expect that an
on-line method can cope with changes in operating conditions and adapt to
contingencies. In other words, on-line methods aspire to produce a design that is
more tailored to the specific mission than the one produced by an off-line
method. On the downside, on-line methods are likely constrained to a reduced
search space with respect to off-line methods because of two main reasons:

● As the design process is performed by the robots themselves while they

are operational, computational resources and time are limiting factor.
● Candidate design that are potentially dangerous for the robots should
be a priori removed from the search space to avoid jeopardizing the
mission.

Moreover, in a realistic on-line setting, the design process is fully distributed on

the robots and cannot count on any centralized entity to measure performance
and guide the search, as it can in an off-line setting. The design process is,
therefore, constrained to use performance indicator that can be evaluated in a
distributed and local way.

In the works on the on-line automatic design of control software for robot
swarms, we can highlight some typical characteristics:

● Each robot of the swarm explores a portion of the search space. Typically,
each robot evaluates asynchronously a subpopulation of instances of
control software and keeps track of their performance.
● The robots exchange information to co-ordinate the search process. 
● Robot swarms are de facto behaviourally heterogeneous, that is, at any
given moment each robot executes a different instance of control
software. This does not necessarily exclude that the robots can eventually
converge to executing the same instance of control software.
● As each robot of the swarm is required to evaluate instances of control
software, the objective function must be computable relying only on
information that is locally available to the robot.
 FIG: SCIENTIFIC DIAGRAM OF SWARM ROBOTS

CHALLENGES
Although a number of promising methods for the automatic design of control
software for robot swarms have been presented and discussed so far, a
consolidated literature on the topic is still missing. In some sense, we could
(somehow provocatively) argue that the state of the art in the automatic design
of control software for robot swarms is undefined and is yet to be properly
identified. 

Moreover, the vast majority of the articles in which interesting automatic design
methods have been introduced were tailored to answer scientific questions that
do not directly belong in automatic design. 

It is our contention that the research on the automatic design of control

software for robot swarms cannot significantly progress further unless the
research community endows itself with a strong, common empirical practice.
Comparisons between different design methods should play a much more
prominent role. At every moment in time, the research community should be
mindful of what is the best method for a given problem, what is the relative
performance of the available methods, and which are the relative strengths and
weaknesses of each existing method. In other words, the state of the art should
be precisely defined and every new proposed method should be compared with
it.
 CURRENT RESEARCH
8.1 DESIGN
The design of a robot swarm is a difficult endeavor: requirements are usually
expressed at the collective level, but the designer needs to define hardware and
behavior at the level of individual robots. The resulting robots should interact in
such a way that the global behavior of the swarm meets the desired
requirements. Approaches to the design problem in swarm robotics can be
divided into two categories: manual design and automatic design.
In manual design, the designer follows a trial-and-error process in which the
behaviors of the individual robot are developed, tested and improved until the
desired collective behavior is obtained. The software architecture that is most
commonly adopted in swarm robotics is the probabilistic finite state machine.
Probabilistic finite state machines have been used to obtain several collective
behaviors,

Another common approach is based on virtual physics. In this approach, robots

and environment interact through virtual forces. This approach is particularly
suited for spatially organizing collective behaviours, such as pattern formation

In swarm robotics, automatic design has been mostly performed using the
evolutionary robotics approach. Typically, individual robots are controlled by a
neural network whose parameters are obtained via artificial evolution.
Evolutionary robotics has been used to develop several collective behaviours
including collective transport and development of communication networks.

8.2 ANALYSIS
The analysis of a robot swarm usually relies on models. A model of a robot
swarm can be realized at two levels: the microscopic level, that is modeling the
behaviors of the individual robots; or the macroscopic level, that is modeling the
collective behavior of the swarm.
Modeling the microscopic level involves forming a detailed representation of
each individual robot in the swarm. Unfortunately, microscopic modeling is
problematic due to the large number of robots involved. Often, microscopic
modeling relies on computer-based simulations..
Macroscopic models avoid the complexity and scalability issues of having to
model each individual robot by considering only the collective behavior of the
swarm. One of the most common macroscopic modeling approaches is the use
of rate or differential equations. Rate equations describe the time evolution of
the ratio of robots in a particular state, that is, of robots that are performing a
specific action or are in a specific area of the environment. Rate equations have
been used to model many collective behaviors, including object clustering and
adaptive foraging. 

8.3 COLLECTIVE BEHAVIOUR

A large part of the research effort in swarm robotics is directed towards the
study of collective behaviors. Collective behaviors can be categorized into five
main groups: spatially organizing behaviors, navigation behaviors,
decision-making behaviors, human interaction behaviors, and other behaviors.
Spatially-organizing behaviors focus on how to organize and distribute robots
and objects in space. Examples of such behaviors are aggregation, pattern
formation, chain formation, self-assembly, and object clustering/assembling.
Navigation behaviors focus on how to coordinate the movement of a robot
swarm. Examples of such behaviors are collective exploration, collective motion,
and collective transport.
Collective decision-making behaviors focus on how robots influence each other
in making decisions. In particular, collective decision-making can be used to
achieve consensus on a single alternative or allocation to different alternatives.
Human-swarm interaction behaviors focus on how a human operator can control
a swarm and receive feedback information from it. For example, robots can
recognize the gestures of a human operator or form groups based on visual and
vocal inputs.
Other behaviors that do not fall in the previously mentioned categories are
collective fault detection and group size regulation.
 

CONCLUSION
We reviewed the most notable achievements in the automatic design of control
software for robot swarms. These achievements show that automatic methods
are a viable and promising approach to the design of control software for robot
swarms. Unfortunately, the literature on the automatic design of control
software for robot swarms appears to be scattered and composed by isolated
contributions: with few exceptions, no comparison between design methods are
provided and new ideas and methods are not properly assessed against a
well-established state of the art. It is our contention that the lack of an empirical
practice hinders the progress of the domain.
In the body, we highlighted four issues that need to be addressed to establish a
proper empirical practice for the automatic design of control software for robot
swarms:
● Every study that proposes or applies an automatic design method should
clearly define a reference model for the robotic platform considered.
● Every automatic design method should be precisely defined in all its parts
and parameters, and univocally identified by a name.
● Libraries of standard benchmarks should be defined and adopted by the
community for assessing newly proposed methods and ideas.
● Robot experiments should be the ultimate way to assess methods for the
automatic design of control software for robot swarms and should be an
essential element of any research study in the domain.
We are convinced that a solid, well-established, and consistently applied
empirical practice would allow the community to promote the best ideas
proposed so far, to focus on promising directions, and to attract further
researches and investments to the domain of the automatic design of control
soft-ware for robot swarms.
 FUTURE SCOPE
Roboticists say the swarms of robots could prove more adaptable and smarter
than individual, self-contained ones. Swarm robotics has many applications in
numerous domains. Swarm robots can be deployed in areas which are spread in
space such as environmental monitoring of lake. The distributed sensing ability
of swarm robotic system can provide surveillance for immediate detection of
hazardous events, such as the accidental leakage of a chemical. Here is a brief
mention to some of the featured swarm robots:

● Swarmanoid- Swarmanoid is a heterogeneous swarm robotic system

capable of operating in a fully 3-dimensional environment. Swarmanoid
comprises of heterogeneous, dynamically connected, autonomous robots
of three types; eye-bots, foot-bots and hand-bots. Eye-bots are
specialized in sensing and analysing the environment from a high position
to provide an overview to the rest. Hand-bots are specialized in moving
and acting in a space zone between the one covered by the foot-bots (the
ground) and the one covered by the eye-bots. Foot-bots are specialized in
moving on rough terrain and transporting either objects or other robots.

A Representational Image of Swarmanoid Robotic System

Alice micro robot swarm- These are cubical swarm robots form a bit huge
army of 90 robots working together. Its simulation was done in WeBots
simulator. Alice has an IR based proximity sensor to detect obstacle, it also has IR
remote to control them manually. Other complexities have been added to this
swarm systems like linear camera, Grip modules etc to increase their capabilities.

A Representational Image of Alice Micro Robot Swarm System

Well with so many proven advantages and many more to come, swarm robotics
offers us a very promising future. Swarm of robots could one day be exploring
space or doing dangerous jobs on earth. Researchers say, with swarm robots life
would be much easier to just design simple robots and allow them to organize
themselves.

The grounds are laid for us to think, to think out-of-the-box and innovate. Stays
inspired and keep yourself motivated, for the future first begins in your mind.
 REFERENCES
1.  Hunt, Edmund R. (2019-03-27). "The social animals that are inspiring new
behaviours for robot swarms". The Conversation. Retrieved 2019-03-28.
2. Hamann, H. (2018). Swarm Robotics: A Formal Approach. New York:
Springer International Publishing. ISBN 978-3-319-74528-2.
3.  N. Correll, D. Rus. Architectures and control of networked robotic
systems. In: Serge Kernbach (Ed.): Handbook of Collective Robotics, pp.
81-104, Pan Stanford, Singapore, 2013.
4. Zahugi, Emaad Mohamed H.; Shabani, Ahmed M.; Prasad, T. V. (2012),
"Libot: Design of a low cost mobile robot for outdoor swarm
robotics", 2012 IEEE International Conference on Cyber Technology in
Automation, Control, and Intelligent Systems (CYBER),
pp. 342–347, doi:10.1109/CYBER.2012.6392577, ISBN
978-1-4673-1421-3.
5. Arvin, F.; Murray, J.C.; Licheng Shi; Chun Zhang; Shigang Yue,
"Development of an autonomous micro robot for swarm robotics,"
Mechatronics and Automation (ICMA), 2014 IEEE International Conference
on , vol., no., pp.635,640, 3-6 Aug. 2014 doi: 10.1109/ICMA.2014.6885771
6.  Lendon, Brad. "U.S. Navy could 'swarm' foes with robot boats". CNN.
7.  Madrigal, Alexis C. (2018-03-07). "Drone Swarms Are Going to Be
Terrifying and Hard to Stop". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2019-03-07.
8. "A self-organizing thousand-robot swarm". Harvard. 14 August 2014.
Retrieved 16 August2014.
9.  Kushleyev, A.; Mellinger, D.; Powers, C.; Kumar, V., "Towards a swarm of
agile micro quadrotors" Autonomous Robots, Volume 35, Issue 4, pp
287-300, November 2013
10. Vasarhelyi, G.; Virágh, C.; Tarcai, N.; Somorjai, G.; Vicsek, T. Outdoor
flocking and formation flight with autonomous aerial robots. IEEE/RSJ
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014),
2014