Robotic Swarm

A large number of unified robots, working together by sensing, communicating, and reacting to each other's actions in real-time.
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Technology Life Cycle

Technology Life Cycle

Growth

Marked by a rapid increase in technology adoption and market expansion. Innovations are refined, production costs decrease, and the technology gains widespread acceptance and use.

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Technology Readiness Level (TRL)

Prototype Testing

Prototype is fully functional and ready for testing in industrially relevant environment.

Technology Diffusion

Technology Diffusion

Early Adopters

Embrace new technologies soon after Innovators. They often have significant influence within their social circles and help validate the practicality of innovations.

Robotic Swarm

Also known as a multi-robot system, this collection of autonomous robots works together in a coordinated manner to achieve a common goal. The technology behind robotic swarms is inspired by the behavior of social insects such as ants and bees, which exhibit complex collective behavior without the need for a centralized control system.

Each robot in a swarm is equipped with sensors and transmission capabilities that allow it to sense its environment and intercommunicate with other robots in the swarm. By sharing information and coordinating their actions, the robots can perform tasks that would be difficult or impossible for a single robot to accomplish.

Robotic swarms have a wide range of applications, from environmental monitoring and disaster response to manufacturing and logistics. For example, a swarm of robots could be used to map the extent of a wildfire, collect data on air quality, or monitor the health of a coral reef. In disaster response, a swarm of robots could be used to search for survivors in a collapsed building or clear debris from a road.

One of the main advantages of this technology is its flexibility and scalability. By adding or removing robots from the swarm, the system can adapt to changing conditions and handle a wide range of tasks. Additionally, robotic swarms perform robustly to individual robot failures, as the swarm as a whole can continue to function even if some robots are damaged or destroyed.

Future Perspectives

Robot swarms might be able to monitor, cultivate, and extract crops on a farm. Operating on a microscale could be useful for maintenance and nano production. For businesses, swarm robots are a building block for the Industrial Internet of Things, predictive analysis, and, ultimately, more efficient operations. Collectively, a swarm of robotic systems can potentially introduce dramatic changes to military operations. Ground, water, and air-based robots could be combined to form swarms, making this strategy relevant for any number of situations - both military and rescue missions.

Since robotic swarms are decentralized by their nature, Blockchain technology is being investigated to make robotic swarm operations more secure and autonomous and provide an infrastructure for ensuring that they follow specified legal and safety regulations as they become increasingly integrated into human society. The three laws of robotics, invented by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, are designed to prevent robots from harming humans, and they could be formalized by using smart contracts stored in this blockchain.

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Sources
Flocks of airborne robots are being developed, able to collaborate and overwhelm enemy defences.
Insect inspired aerial vehicles could evolve into useful minions to track, map, and respond to climate change.
Insect-inspired robots with potential uses in crop pollination, search and rescue missions, surveillance, as well as high-resolution weather, climate, and environmental monitoring.
The research progress of swarm robotics is reviewed in details. The swarm robotics inspired from nature is a combination of swarm intelligence and robotics, which shows a great potential in several aspects. First of all, the cooperation of nature swarm and swarm intelligence are briefly introduced, and the special features of the swarm robotics are summarized compared to a single robot and other multi-individual systems. Then the modeling methods for swarm robotics are described, followed by a list of several widely used swarm robotics entity projects and simulation platforms. Finally, as a main part of this paper, the current research on the swarm robotic algorithms are presented in detail, including cooperative control mechanisms in swarm robotics for flocking, navigating and searching applications.
Global "Swarm Robotics Market" report exhibits a pin-point breakdown of Industry dependent on type, applications, and...
AI-powered robotic platform maker OffWorld has announced that it is now taking orders for delivery of multi-species deployments of its AI-powered industrial swarm robotic mining systems commencing in 2024.
PETER SINGER, AN expert on future warfare at the New America think-tank, is in no doubt. “What we have is a series of technologies that change the game. They’re not science fiction. They raise new questions. What’s possible?
Swarms of drones will help farmers to map weeds in their field, and improve crop yields. This is the promise of a recently founded research project called ‘SAGA: Swarm Robotics for Agricultural Applications’, to be presented at the forthcoming Maker Fair held in Rome from October the 14th to the 16th. The project will deliver a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) programmed to monitor a field and precisely map the presence of weeds among the crops through on-board machine vision. Additionally, drones communicate among each other to aggregate to and accurately inspect only the most weed-infested areas, in a way similar to swarms of bees that forage only from the most profitable flower patches. In this way, the planning of weed control activities can be limited to high-priority areas, hence generating savings while increasing productivity.
“The project addressed one of the grand challenges in robotics – how a robotic system can exhibit properties of living beings,” explains Dr Gross, whose work was supported by a Marie Curie European Reintegration Grant (ERG). The project succeeded in getting miniature robots, acting autonomously on the basis of very simple pre-programming, to perform a number of collective tasks. These tasks included gathering together in a single place, segregating themselves into distinct sub-groups, and cooperatively transporting objects.
Currently, robotics is a rapidly developing knowledge field with great potential in all spheres of modern society. The most relevant recent developments in this field are group robotics projects.
Researchers at MIT have created assembling robots that are made up of the same components they use to build structures.
MIT's Mediated Matter Group unveiled Fiberbots, a digital fabrication platform that utilizes a series of small robots that work cooperatively to create fiber-based structures, or potentially whatever is at hand.
Swarms of robots will revolutionize many industrial applications, from targeted material delivery to precision farming. However, sev...
Engineers and computer scientists can learn a lot from the swarm behaviour of animals when developing new robotics systems.
Harvard researchers create a swarm of 1,000 tiny robots that, upon command, can autonomously combine to form requested shapes — a significant advance in artificial intelligence.
Engineers at SRI International have developed a swarm of micro magnetically-controlled robots that could be the factory manufacturers of tomorrow.
A not-for-profit organization, IEEE is the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.© Copyright 2017 IEEE - All rights reserved. Use of this web site signifies your agreement to the terms and conditions.
Oceanographers dropped mini underwater drones off the coast of California and found they congregated like plankton.
Most robots are usually made to do one particular job, so they’re not very adaptable to new situations. But researchers at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell Universities have developed particle robots – simple circular devices that can connect to each other magnetically to move and work as a swarm.

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2011 — 2024