TOWARDS PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SWARM ROBOTICS: OVERVIEW OF SWARM TASKS

Abstract

Swarm robotics is a relatively new research area inspired from biological systems such as ant or bee colonies. It composes a system consisting of many small robots with simple control mechanisms capable of achieving complex collective behaviours on the swarm level such as aggregation, pattern formation and collective transportation to name a few. However, more research is still required to apply swarm robotics in practice. Within the scope of our knowledge at the moment there are no swarm robotics applications for real-life problems. The current research tends to solve specific tasks in controlled laboratory environments. In this paper we survey the existing works on swarm robotics and their applications and also analyse the potential of their applicability to solve real-life problems The analysis of the results of these studies shows that robot swarms are capable to solve these tasks satisfactory in controlled laboratory environments, at the same time there is no evidence of applying swarm robotics to solve real-life problems. The purpose of this paper is to take a step closer to bridging the gap between research in swarm robotics and their practical applications. We analyze the existing approaches in the field of swarm robotics and discuss their result applicability for solving real-life problems by outlining tasks that have been studied in the context of swarm robotics systems and analysing their potential practical applications. We also discuss how the tasks could be combined to achieve desirable practical results. Tasks of the swarm The potential applications of swarm robotics range from surveillance operations (15) to mine disarming in hostile environments (16). We believe it is essential to identify the tasks that can be solved using swarm robotics. According to recent literature reviews (1; 2; 17-19), swarm robotics has been studied in the context of the following tasks: Aggregation deals with spatially grouping all robots together in a region of the environment. Aggregation is used to get robots in a swarm sufficiently close together and can be used as a starting point for performing some additional tasks, such as communication with limited range. Aggregation near points of interest can be viewed as the first step of more complex tasks, such as collective