Swarm robotics

While various formulations of swarm intelligence principles exist, one widely recognized set includes:Miniaturization is also key factor in swarm robotics, as the effect of thousands of small robots can maximize the effect of the swarm-intelligent approach to achieve meaningful behavior at swarm-level through a greater number of interactions on an individual level.

This work was then expanded upon through the Swarmanoid project (2006–2010), which extended the ideas and algorithms developed in Swarm-bots to heterogeneous robot swarms composed of three types of robots—flying, climbing, and ground-based—that collaborated to carry out a search and retrieval task.

[9] Swarms of robots of different sizes could be sent to places that rescue-workers cannot reach safely, to explore the unknown environment and solve complex mazes via onboard sensors.

[11] A drone swarm may undertake different flight formations to reduce overall energy consumption due to drag forces.

[17] Another large set of applications may be solved using swarms of micro air vehicles, which are also broadly investigated nowadays.

[21][22] Swarms of micro aerial vehicles have been already tested in tasks of autonomous surveillance,[23] plume tracking,[24] and reconnaissance in a compact phalanx.

[29] In 2023, University of Washington and Microsoft researchers demonstrated acoustic swarms of tiny robots that create shape-changing smart speakers.

The robots are also made with provisions for indoor use via Wi-Fi, since the GPS sensors provide poor communication inside buildings.

Another such attempt is the micro robot (Colias),[35] built in the Computer Intelligence Lab at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Miniaturization and mass mobilization allows the manufacturing system to achieve scale invariance, not limited in effective build volume.