ABSTRACT

A number of robots working in tandem are often preferred over a single robot due to improved system performance, distributed action over a number of locations, better fault tolerance and economic considerations. In multirobot systems, sensing works over a number of robots and therefore over a much larger range than the physical limitation of the sensing ranges of each robot. Swarm robotics is a novel emergent group behaviour of multiple agents lacking in a centralised control or global knowledge, where each individual agent has minimal hardware and is tasked with low-level behaviour, but complex global behaviour is manifested in the group. Communication with the nearest neighbours fosters distributed coordination across the group. Behaviour of a swarm is notoriously difficult to predict, and is still to be honed into an engineering tool. The achievement of order in the global level of the swarm due to individual interaction of its agents is probably the most striking feature of the swarm.