Review: Swarm Robotics: From Sources of Inspiration to Domains of Application

As the first reviewed article I've chosen "'Sahin, Erol - Swarm Robotics" because it is a nice overview of the technology and tries do define swarm robotics as an area of robotics with very clear boundaries and goals.

The first part of the article is about motivation for studies, highlighting the three most praised characteristics of swarm systems, that are:

• Robustness;
• Flexibility;
• Scalability.

After that comes a brief explanation about the ambitions of the work, saying it not pretend to be a formal definition of the area, but a guideline for future developments. Setting a nice statement as starting point:

"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."

Then going through some points about autonomous robots such as:

• Large number of robots;
• Few homogenous groups of robots;
• Relatively incapable or inefficient robots;
• Robots with local sensing and communication capabilities.

The following topic is about sources of inspiration for swarm robotics and collective behavior in general, most of then biological with some very informative content about bacterial mechanisms and so on.

Finally some possible applications where swarms are highly recommended:

• Tasks that cover a region;
• Tasks that are too dangerous;
• Tasks that scale-up or scale-down in time;
• Tasks that require redundancy.

Ref: The article site at Springer Link (it can be downloaded under certain universities proxys) http://www.springerlink.com/content/cc4k8mdhbhk0uw3y/

Paper Review season is open!

While I do not solve the commercial problems with iRobot I will start the reviews of my project bibliography, I'm using Mendeley to organize the papers into categories and to classify notes about each one.

Until now my list is:

1. Beni G. From swarm intelligence to swarm robotics Sahin E, Spears WM, eds. Ant Colony Optimization and Swarm Intelligence Proceedings. 2005;3342:1-9. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=pubmed&cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=000228181500001.

2. Campo A, Nouyan S, Birattari M, Groß R, Dorigo M. Enhancing cooperative transport using negotiation of goal direction. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.146.300.

3. Cao YU, Fukunaga AS, Kahng AB. Cooperative Mobile Robotics: Antecedents and Directions. 1997;4:226-234. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.16.3358.

4. Ducatelle F, Di Caro A. G, Gambardella M. L. Cooperative Self-Organization in a Heterogeneous Swarm Robotic System. Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1830501.

5. Ferrante E. A Control Architecture for a Heterogeneous Swarm of Robots: The Design of a Modular Behavior-based Architecture. 2009;(TR/IRIDIA/2009-010):77. Available at: http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/IridiaTrSeries/IridiaTr2009-010r001.pdf.

6. Garnier S, Gautrais J, Asadpour M, Jost C, Theraulaz G. Self-Organized Aggregation Triggers Collective Decision Making in a Group of Cockroach-Like Robots. Adaptive Behavior. 2009;17(2):109-133. Available at: http://adb.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/109.

7. Holland O, Melhuish C. Stigmergy, Self-Organization, and Sorting in Collective Robotics. 2006. Available at: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/106454699568737.

8. Kube CR. Collective Robotics: From Social Insects to Robots. Adaptive Behavior. 1993;2(2):189-218. Available at: http://adb.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/2/2/189.

9. Kunz H, Hemelrijk CK, Intelligence A. Artificial Fish Schools: Collective Effects of School Size, Body Size, and Body Form. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.139.6329.

10. Magnenat S, Rétornaz P, Noris B, Mondada F. Scripting the swarm: event-based control of microcontroller-based robots. In: SIMPAR 2008 Workshop Proceedings.; 2008. Available at: http://monicareggiani.net/simpar2008/StandardPlatform/scpr2008-03-Magnenat.pdf.

11. Magnenat S, Member S, Bonani M, Longchamp V, Mondada F. 1 ASEBA: A Modular Architecture for Event-Based Control of Complex Robots. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.172.7935.

12. Mondada F, Bonani M, Magnenat S, Guignard A, Floreano D. Physical connections and cooperation in swarm robotics. Intelligent Autonomous Systems. 2004:53. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=IKscPz-GaxAC&oi=fnd&pg=PA53&dq=Physical+connections+and+cooperation+in+swarm+robotics&ots=Asv3PFtmVg&sig=3sN6oMwiOjlowCvzvcmgZLSwkWE.

13. Nouyan S, Groß R, Dorigo M, et al. Group Transport along a Robot Chain in a Self-Organised Robot Colony. 2005:433-442. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.60.4512.

14. Reynolds CW. Flocks, Herds, and Schools: A Distributed Behavioral Model. 1987:25-34. Available at: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.7069.

15. Sahin E, Spears WM, Şahin E. Swarm Robotics. (Şahin E, Spears WM, eds.). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg; 2005:10-20-20. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/cc4k8mdhbhk0uw3y/.

16. Sharkey AJC. Swarm robotics and minimalism. Connection Science. 2007;19(3):245-260. Available at: http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/09540090701584970.

17. Timmis J, Murray L, Neal M. A Neural-Endocrine Architecture for Foraging in Swarm Robotic Systems - Nature Inspired Cooperative Strategies for Optimization (NICSO 2010) - Studies in Computational Intelligence. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg; 2010:319-330-330. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/content/u115n2635g1w9880/.

18. Şahin E, Winfield A. Special issue on swarm robotics. Swarm Intelligence. 2008;2(2-4):69-72. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/index/10.1007/s11721-008-0020-6.

"Plant Neurobiology" : Smart vegetables

I've recently watched prof. Stefano Mancuso, from LINV, on TED.
He studies plant neurobiology, not sure if it's cosidered a "field",formaly speaking, but it sure deserves to be. He shows evidence of a collective intelligence in plants by analyzing electric signals an plant reactions, actions, networks etc.

Social Behavior on bacteria

A nice TED talk about bacterial communication by Bonnie Bassler. She studies how bacteria can communicate with one another, through chemical signals, to act as a unit. Her work could pave the way for new, more potent medicine.

A Modular Architecture for Event-Based Control of Complex Robots

This scary title is the title of a paper I've found on the internet these days.

It's pretty much useful for my research, I was thinking on ways to connect on an organized way a central controller (eLua based) and some "satellite" MCU's doing the dirty jobs (sensors low-level interface, motor control and so on...).

Here is a link, through Dr. Francesco Mondada from EPFL. (ASEBA)