A Self-Organising Artefact: The Swarm-bot

This chapter is dedicated to the description of the swarm robotic system that has been used for our experimental activities: the swarm-bot (Mondada et al., 2004; Dorigo et al., 2004). A swarm-bot is defined as a self-assembling, selforganising artefact formed by a number of independent robotic units, called s-bots. In the swarm-bot form, the s-bots become a single robotic system that can move and reconfigure. Physical connections between s-bots are essential for solving many collective tasks, such as the retrieval of a heavy object. Also, during navigation on rough terrain, physical links can serve as support if the swarm-bot has to pass over a hole wider than a single s-bot, or when it has to pass through a steep concave region. However, for tasks such as searching for a goal location or tracing an optimal path to a goal, a swarm of unconnected s-bots can be more efficient. In the following, we describe in detail the sbot’s features and its simulation (see Section 5.1). Section 5.2 concludes the chapter with a brief review of the most relevant studies in which the swarm-bot robotics platform has been exploited.