24 September 2024
Swarm robotics is the study of how to design self-organized, autonomous groups of robots. In a robot swarm, coordinated collective behavior emerges from interactions among robots and between robots and their environment. Consequently, designing a robot swarm has traditionally been associated with identifying or engineering interaction rules to achieve a specific desired collective behavior. Depending on the research goals, differences arise in the underlying hypotheses guiding the development of the system, the opportunities to abstract intervening factors and isolate key study variables, and the ability to establish experimental protocols suitable for statistical analysis.
In this work, EMERGE partners from the University of Bristol illustrate the varying complexity of designing robot swarms using a conceptual framework borrowed from organizational theory and systems thinking. Specifically, the authors examine the issue from the perspective of three levels of complexity: puzzle, problem, and mess. This conceptual framework helps identify and express the complexity of an issue based on the number of intervening factors, its general formulation, and available solutions. They discuss how (i) the swarm robotics literature evolved by solving particular puzzles, (ii) recent advances in the automatic design of robot swarms are providing new tools to tackle a more general problem, and (iii) achieving large-scale robot swarms that operate in real-world scenarios is a mess.
Read the paper in the link below.
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