Swarm Robotics: Past, Present, and Future [Point of View]

Swarm robotics deals with the design, construction, and deployment of large groups of robots that coordinate and cooperatively solve a problem or perform a task. It takes inspiration from natural self-organizing systems, such as social insects, fish schools, or bird flocks, characterized by emergent collective behavior based on simple local interaction rules [1], [2]. Typically, swarm robotics extracts engineering principles from the study of those natural systems in order to provide multirobot systems with comparable abilities. This way, it aims to build systems that are more robust, fault-tolerant, and flexible than single robots and that can better adapt their behavior to changes in the environment.