SWARM ROBOTICS

TECHNICAL SEMINAR REPORT

Submitted by

ARUL NISHANTH R (171EI109)

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS AND INSTRUMENTATION

ENGINEERING
BANNARI AMMAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
(An Autonomous Institution Affiliated to Anna University, Chennai)
SATHYAMANGALAM-638401

APRIL 2020

0
 BONAFIDE CERTIFICATE

Certified that this technical seminar report “SWARM ROBOTICS” is the

bonafide work of “ARUL NISHANTH R (171EI109)” who carried out the

seminar under my supervision.

SIGNATURE SIGNATURE

DR. C. GANESH BABU Mrs. M. KALAIYARASI

HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

DEPARTMENT OF EIE, DEPARTMENT OF EIE,
BANNARI AMMAN INSTITUTE OF BANNARI AMMAN INSTITUTE OF
TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY,
SATHYAMANGALAM SATHYAMANGALAM

Submitted for Viva Voce examination held on ………………

INTERNAL EXAMINER EXTERNAL EXAMINER

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER NO TITLE PAGE NO

ABSTRACT 4

1. INTRODUCTION 5

1.1 HISTORY OF SWARM ROBOTICS

1.2 INSPIRATION FROM NATURE

2. LITERATURE REVIEW 7

3. CONTROL APPROACH 9
3.1 CENTRALISED AND DECENTRALISED
3.2 CONTROL CLASSIFICATION
3.3 MODELLING OF SWARM ALGORTIHM
3.4 ROBOTIC PLATFORMS

4. MODES OF COMMUNICATION 14
4.1 IMPLICIT COMMUNICATION
4.2 EXPLICIT COMMUNICATION
4.3 APPLICATIONS
4.4 ADVANTAGES
4.5 DISADVANTAGES

5. CONCLUSION 17

REFERENCES 18
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 LIST OF FIGURES

TABLE.NO TITLE PAGE.NO

1 SWARMS IN NATURE 6

2 THE KILOBOTS 8

3 CENTRALISED BOTS 9

4 DECENTRALISED BOTS 10

5 KHEPERA ROBOT 13

ABSTRACT

Swarm robotics is an approach to collective robotics that takes inspiration from

the self-organized behaviours of social animals. Through simple rules and local
interactions, swarm robotics aims at designing robust, scalable, and flexible
collective behaviours for the coordination of large numbers of robots. In this
paper, we analyze the literature from the point of view of swarm engineering: we
focus mainly on ideas and concepts that contribute to the advancement of swarm
robotics as an engineering field and that could be relevant to tackle real-world
applications. Swarm engineering is an emerging discipline that aims at defining
systematic and well founded procedures for modelling, designing, realizing,
verifying, validating, operating, and maintaining a swarm robotics system. We
propose two taxonomies: in the first taxonomy, we classify works that deal with
design and analysis methods; in the second taxonomy, we classify works
according to the collective behaviour studied. We conclude with a discussion of
the current limits of swarm robotics as an engineering discipline and with
suggestions for future research directions.

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 CHAPTER 1

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 HISTORY OF SWARM ROBOTICS

Swarm robotics has been defined as “a novel approach to the

coordination of large numbers of robots” and as “the study of how large numbers
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.” (S¸ahin, 2005). The main characteristics
of a swarm robotics system are the following:

● Robots are autonomous

● Robots are situated in the environment and can act to modify it
● Robots’ sensing and communication capabilities are local
● Robots do not have access to centralized control and/or to global
knowledge
● Robots cooperate to tackle a given task

1.2 INSPIRATION FROM NATURE:

The main inspiration for swarm robotics comes from the observation of
social animals. Ants, bees, birds and fish are some examples of how simple
individuals can become successful when they gather in groups. The interest
towards social animals stems from the fact that they exhibit a sort of swarm
intelligence (Bonabeau et al., 1999; Dorigo and Birattari, 2007). In particular, the
behavior of groups of social animals appear to be robust, scalable and flexible.

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Robustness is the ability to cope with the loss of individuals. In social animals,
robustness is promoted by redundancy and the absence of a leader. Scalability is
the ability to perform well with different group sizes. The introduction or removal
of individuals does not result in a drastic change of the performance of a swarm.
In social animals, scalability is promoted by local sensing and communication.
Flexibility is the ability to cope with a broad spectrum of different environments
and tasks. In social animals, flexibility is promoted by redundancy, simplicity of
the behaviors and mechanisms such as task allocation. A detailed analysis of
robustness, scalability and flexibility in social animals has been carried out by
Camazine et al. (2001). By taking inspiration from social animals, swarm robotics
aims at developing robotics systems that exhibit swarm intelligence features
similar to those that characterize social animals. In particular, swarm robotics
systems are meant to be robust, scalable and flexible.

Bee swarm

Ant swarm

Fish swarm

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 CHAPTER-2

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW:

Bahc¸eci et al. (2003) presented a review of works on pattern

formation in which they analyzed centralized and decentralized behaviors.
Another review on the topic has been published in 2009 by Varghese and McKee.
Spears et al. (2004) developed a collective behavior for pattern formation that is
one of the first applications of virtual physics-based design. In their work, they
use the virtual forces to form an hexagonal lattice (see Figure 5(a)). In the same
work, Spears et al. showed that, by creating two groups of robots with different
attraction/repulsion thresholds, it is also possible to obtain a square lattice. More
details can be found in a subsequent work (Spears and Spears, 2012). Shucker and
Bennett (2007) presented a behavior in which robots interact via virtual springs
(see Figure 5(b)). These virtual springs are used by a robot to compute
attraction/repulsion virtual forces. Differently from Spears et al.’s work, in this
work, the robots can interact in different ways (full connectivity, first neighbors,
N-nearest, ...). Each type of interaction has different characteristics and gives rise
to slightly different patterns. Additional theoretical work is presented in a
subsequent paper (Shucker et al., 2008). Flocchini et al. (2008) focused on a
theoretical analysis of pattern formation. The authors were able to formally prove
that with a group of fully asynchronous robots it is possible to obtain only a subset
of all possible patterns, whereas other patterns are achievable only with some kind
of global knowledge such as a common orientation given by a compass. In one of
the first works on task allocation, Krieger and Billeter (2000) developed a very
simple, threshold based mechanism. Robots have to collect prey that are then
converted into energy in the nest. While foraging, the robots consume energy. To
replenish this energy, the robots can draw it from a common reservoir. Each robot
decides to leave and collect prey or to stay in the nest according to a probability.
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This probability depends on whether the nest energy is above or below a given
threshold. Since this threshold is not homogeneous in the swarm, the number of
robots allocated to foraging or to resting is a function of the energy level of the
nest. Agassounon and Martinoli (2002) studied task allocation in a foraging task
similar to the one studied by Krieger and Billeter (2000). However, in this case
the probability to select the foraging task or the resting task depends on individual
observations of the environment and of other robots. Thus, the probability is a
function of the success or failure of the last foraging trial, of the frequency with
which other robots are encountered when foraging or of the perceived density of
prey. A mathematical model of a similar task allocation behavior has been
developed by Liu et al. (2007) (see Figure 13(a)). Yun et al. (2009) studied the
problem of how to allocate robots on a construction site so that the number of
assembling operation to do is shared equally. Each robot computes optimal
equalmass partitions, that is, partitions with the same number of operations, by
sharing information with its neighbors. The developed behavior is robust to
changes in the environment and scalable with the number of robots.

The Kilobots, a swarm of one thousand simple but collaborative robots.

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 CHAPTER-3
CONTROL APPROACH

3.1 CENTRALISED AND DECENTRALISED:

They consist of homogeneous small robotic units that are tightly connected to
each other, forming the body of the robot. ... Generally, control of a multirobot
system is a challenging issue. There are two approaches to this issue: Centralized
control and Decentralized control.

❖ CENTRALISED

• Master bot makes the decision

• Other robots obey the decisions

• Master slave configuration of robots.

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❖ DE-CENTRALISED
• Completely Autonomous

• Depends on others for path, location, target, etc

• No master slave configuration.

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3.2 CONTROL FLOWCHART:

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3.3 MODELLING OF SWARM ALGORITHM :

Cooperative schemes from swarm intelligence algorithms have been

introduced into the swarm robotics in many researches. Since the robots use the
same or similar schemes with these algorithms, the models and other methods
used to analyze these algorithms, which are quite mature than that in swarm
robotics, can be used directly for robot research.

The most commonly used algorithm from swarm intelligence is the particle swarm
optimization (PSO) which mimics the flocking process of the birds. The particles
fly in the field and search for the best. It can be found obviously that many
commons remain between PSO and swarm robotics. A mapping between particle
and robot can be presented easily .

Besides PSO, the researchers also introduce other swarm intelligence algorithms
into swarm robotics. Many successful swarm models were inspired from the ant
colonies. These inspired approaches provide an effective heuristics for searching
in dynamic environment and routing

3.4 ROBOTIC PLATFORMS

Several robotic platforms used in swarm-robotic experiments in different

laboratories are summarised. These platforms are the following.

(i) Khepera robot [11], for research and educational purposes, developed by
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), widely
used in the past, nowadays has fallen in disuse;

(ii) Khepera III robot (http://www.k-team.com/) [12], designed by K-Team

together with EPFL;

(iii) e-puck robot (http://www.e-puck.org/) [13], designed at EPFL for

educational purposes;
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(iv) The miniature Alice robot [14] also developed at EPFL;

(v) Jasmine robot (http://www.swarmrobot.org/) [15], developed under the

Iswarm project;

(vi) I-Swarm robot (http://www.i-swarm.org/) [16], very small, also developed

by the I-swarm project;

(vii) S-Bot (http://www.swarm-bots.org/) [17], very versatile, with many

actuators, developed in the Swarm-bots project;

(viii) Kobot (http://www.kovan.ceng.metu.edu.tr/) [18], designed by Middle

East Technical University (Turkey);

(ix) SwarmBot (http://www.irobot.com/) [19], designed by i-Robot company

for research.

Khepera robot – internal structure

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 CHAPTER-4

MODE OF COMMUNICATION

4.1 EXPLICIT COMMUNICATION :

● It is also known as direct communication

● Robots are directly involved
● eg- bluetooth , MANET ,WSN

4.2 IMPLICIT COMMUNICATION :

● It is also known as indirect communication

● Robots are indirectly involved
● eg- virtual phermone , stigmergy.

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4.3 APPLICATIONS:

● Potential applications are enormous like military sector, prosthetic

dexterity , self balancing robots, autonomous routing, mapping, etc.

● 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.
● In this way swarms of robots can be really useful for dangerous tasks. For
example, for mining detection and cleaning. It can be more useful than a
unique specialised robot, mainly because of the robustness of the swarm:
if one robot fails and the mine explodes, the rest of the swarm continues
working. In the case of a single robot this is not possible.
● 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.

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4.4 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.

(iv) Distributed action: a group a robots can actuate in different places at the

same time.

(v) Fault tolerance: under certain conditions, the failure of a single robot

within a group does not imply that the given task cannot be accomplished, thanks

to the redundancy of the system.

4.5 DISADVANTAGES:

● Interference: robots in a group can interfere between them, due to

collisions, occlusions, and so forth.

● Uncertainty concerning other robots’ intentions: coordination requires to

know what other robots are doing. If this is not clear robots can compete

instead of cooperate.

● Overall system cost: the fact of using more than one robot can make the

economic cost bigger. This is ideally not the case of swarm-robotic

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 systems, which intend to use many cheap and simple robots which total

cost is under the cost of a more complex single robot carrying out the

same task

● The inter swarm communication can be affected by different

atmospheric conditions

● The localisation and mapping in real world will consume more due to

limitation of current technology

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 CHAPTER -5

CONCLUSION

Swarm robotics is an approach to collective robotics that has received a great

deal of attention in recent years. Swarm robotics aims at developing systems that

are robust, scalable and flexible. In this paper, we analyzed the literature from the

swarm engineering perspective. We proposed two taxonomies to analyze the

swarm robotics literature: the methods taxonomy, in which we discussed the main

design and analysis methods, and the collective behaviors taxonomy, in which we

categorized the main collective behaviors according to their goal. Swarm robotics

has several possible applications, including: exploration, surveillance, search and

rescue, humanitarian demining, intrusion tracking, cleaning, inspection and

transportation of large objects. Despite their potential to be robust, scalable and

flexible, up to now, swarm robotics systems have never been usedto tackle a

realworld application and are still confined to the world of academic research. At

the current state of development of the swarm robotics field, the focus is mostly

on obtaining desired collective behaviors and understanding their properties. In

order to avoid the problems that arise in real-world applications, researchers

usually tackle simplified testbed application.

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