ABSTRACT
When advancing the concept of cooperative robotics, wheremultiple
robotic agents assist each other in the execution of a mission,
one finally arrives at swarm robotics. There does not exist a
hard boundary between the two fields of cooperative and swarm
robotics. However, one regards a collection of cooperative robots
a swarm when the number of agents is sufficiently high so that
swarm principles as observed in nature can be applied. Among
these principles is the noncentralized organization of the swarm.
Hence, it is not sufficient to only increase the number of robot
agents to call a collection of robots a swarm. But, to demonstrate
swarm behavior, the number of agents should be high enough to
permit a sufficient number of coincidental robot-robot interactions
with varying partners, where 100 agents, in standard laboratory
conditions, as a minimum is a reasonable value.