Swarm Robotics: A Survey

Swarm robotics (SR) has recently gained a lot of interest for its desired properties: robustness, flexibility, and scalability. These properties are of paramount importance in many real-world applications. SR aims at coordinating a large number of low-cost robots by taking inspiration from the living systems that exhibit self-organized behaviour. In this survey, we review the SR literature and describe the characteristics of an SR system and its real-world applications, the existing SR research platforms and simulators, the SR design methods, and the taxonomy of the swarm behaviours. This work represents a brief and concise overview of the SR field that guides researchers to some seminal works and different tools to begin their research.