Hardware Architecture Review of Swarm Robotics System – Self Reconfigurability, Self Reassembly and Self Replication

Swarm robotics is one the most fascinating and new research areas of recent decades, and one of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of swarm robots that are self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on hardware architecture and several other important aspects of modular swarm robots, such as: selfreconfigurability, self-replication, and self-assembly. The key factors in designing and building a group of swarm robots are cost and miniaturization with robustness, flexibility and scalability. In robotics intelligence, self-assembly and self reconfigurability are among the most important characteristics as they can add additional capabilities and functionality to swarm robots. Simulation and model design for swarm robotics is highly complex and expensive, especially when attempting to model the behavior of large swarm robot groups.