Past, Present, and Future of Swarm Robotics

Swarm Robotics is an emerging field of adapting the phenomenon of natural swarms to robotics and a study of robots to mimic natural swarms, like ants and birds, to form a scalable, flexible, and robust system. These robots show self-organization, autonomy, cooperation, and coordination amongst themselves. Additionally, their cost and design complexity factor must be as low as possible to reach systems similar to natural swarms. Further, the communication amongst the robots can either be direct (robot-to-robot) or indirect (robot-to-environment) and without any central entity to control them. Swarm robotics has a wide range of application fields, from simple household tasks to military missions. This paper reviews the swarm robotics approaches from its history to its future based on 217 references. It highlights the prominent pioneers of swarm robotics and enlights the initial swarm robotics methods. The presence of swarm robotics is shown based on simulators, projects, and real-life applications. For the future, this paper presents visions and ideas of swarm robotics.