Survey on decentralized modular robots and control platforms

Abstract

Swarm robotics is a relatively new field that has utilized significant progress in the area of multi-agent robotic systems over the last two decades. At times, Swarm robotic systems adopt a decentralized approach in which the desired collective behaviors emerge from local decisions made by robots themselves according to their environment. On the other hand, traditional multi-robot systems basically use centralized communication control in coordinating each robot. The fact that typical swarm of robots consists of relatively simple and homogeneous robots allows the group to self-organize or dynamically reorganize the way individual robots are deployed. Therefore, the swarm approach is considered to be highly robust to the failure of individual robots. The decentralized approach not only addresses the fact that there is a shortage of available software frameworks for distributed control systems/robotics but also introduces system software for controlling multiple expandable and reconfigurable swarm agents. We investigate the behavior of many swarm systems that have been proposed in the literature. In this survey we provide a detailed summary of systems that have been classified under four main categories of the multi-robot system platforms namely; self-reconfigurable, modular, self-replicating, and swarm systems. We present a preliminary taxonomy for swarm robotics and classify existing studies into this taxonomy.