Swarm Robotics Behaviors and Tasks: A Technical Review

The field of swarm robotics has been researched for the last few decades to mimic the capability and the intelligence of biological insects and animals that possess social behavior. Since the introduction, many valuable contributions from different aspects and scopes of the swarm robotics researches have been made. In this chapter, a technical review related to the swarm robotics tasks is presented. In swarm robotics, some tasks can be considered as fundamental tasks while other tasks are the one that correlated to the fundamental tasks. In this review, the tasks are categorized into two major types: low-level tasks and high-level tasks. The low-level tasks include aggregation, dispersion, self-assembly and self-reconfigurable, pattern formation and flocking, robot–environment interaction, task allocation, and learning. The discussion scopes of the low-level tasks include definition and purpose, classification and methods. The high-level tasks include collective source searching, collective mapping, collective foraging, collective transport, collective manipulation, and collective tracking. High-level tasks are discussed in terms of related skills and methods. As a complementary, in early part of this chapter, some swarm robotics hardware and software platforms are briefly highlighted to give an overview of the platforms that can be useful for swarm robotics behaviors and tasks researched. At the end of this chapter, the challenges and the ways forward of swarm robotics research from the perspective of swarm robotics task are briefly suggested. This review is expected to give an overall swarm robotics research overview and contributes to the knowledge references specifically from the perspective of swarm robotics behaviors and tasks.