Research Advance in Swarm Robotics

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.