Swarm intelligence in optimization and robotics

Abstract

Swarm intelligence is an artificial intelligence discipline, which was created on the basis of the laws that govern the behavior of, for example, social insects, fish schools, and flocks of birds. The or-ganization of these animal societies has always mesmerized humans. Therefore, it is surprising that it has only been in the second half of the last century that some of the most important principles of swarm intelligent behavior have been unraveled. A prime example is stigmergy, which refers to a self-organization of the animal society via changes applied to the environment. In this chapter, we provide a concise introduction to swarm intelligence, with two main research lines in mind: optimization and robotics. Popular examples of optimization algorithms based on swarm intelligence principles are ant colony opti-mization and particle swarm optimization. On the other side, the field of robotics has adopted various swarm intelligent behaviors for problem solving and organizing groups of robots. This has resulted in a separate research field nowadays known as swarm robotics.