In the last decades, studies on swarm robotics have grown significantly, with different implementation details becoming of interest in research works. Although the first idea in swarm robotics should be the application or the task that robots should perform, other aspects can be studied. In a robotic swarm, it may be necessary to select the robots that will perform a given task, which is a divi...

A swarm of robots is composed of several small and simple robots that can communicate to perform complex tasks. Those robots are subject to failures: battery outage, hardware destruction, or hardware failure. When a robot fails, its whole state is lost. The task realized by this robot needs to be restarted then the swarm might need some data from the failed robot. Even when this data is not nee...

This paper presents a new approach to control robots, which can quickly find their swarm while tracking a moving target through the obstacles of the environment. In this approach, an artificial potential field is generated between each free-robot and the virtual attractive point of the swarm. This artificial potential field will lead free-robots to their swarm. The swarm-finding of these freero...

The recruiting system in foraging ant colonies is a typical example of swarm intelligence. The system is underpinned by the use of volatile pheromones which form a trail connecting from nest to food. We have incorporated this property into the behavior of the swarm of real robots. Because the trail is narrow, avoiding overcrowding on the trail, as well as in the environment, is a critical issue...

Urban search and rescue is a difficult domain for autonomous mobile robots to operate in. The environment can be expected to be highly unstructured, with many obstacles and hazards for a robot to deal with. In addition, if human rescue teams are going to accept robotic assistance, they need to be assured that the robots are going to be helpful, not a hindrance. With these factors in mind, we ha...

The Swarm Intelligence literature frequently asserts that swarms exhibit high levels of robustness. That claim is, however, rather less frequently supported by empirical or theoretical analysis. But what do we mean by a ‘robust’ swarm? How would we measure the robustness or to put it another way fault tolerance of a robotic swarm? These questions are not just of academic interest. If swarm robo...

This paper presents a new approach to control robots, which can quickly find their swarm while tracking a moving target through the obstacles of the environment. In this approach, an artificial potential field is generated between each free-robot and the virtual attractive point of the swarm. This artificial potential field will lead free-robots to their swarm. The swarm-finding of these freero...

Emergencies in industrial warehouses are a major concern for fire fighters. The large dimensions together with the development of dense smoke that drastically reduces visibility, represent major challenges. The Guardians robot swarm is designed to assist fire fighters in searching a large warehouse. In this paper we discuss the technology developed for a swarm of robots assisting fire fighters....

The robotics team at Utah State University has been working on incrementally building the capabilities needed to field an autonomous swarm of rescue robots. We believe a swarm of small, low-cost robots that can identify areas needing further investigation would be of great benefit to first responders to the scene of a disaster. Blue Swarm 3 is the latest iteration in this development process an...