Paper ID: 2405.04079

Leveraging swarm capabilities to assist other systems

Miquel Kegeleirs, David Garzón Ramos, Guillermo Legarda Herranz, Ilyes Gharbi, Jeanne Szpirer, Ken Hasselmann, Lorenzo Garattoni, Gianpiero Francesca, Mauro Birattari

Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient, independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm robotics. A robot swarm could act as a support in an heterogeneous system comprising other robots and/or human operators, in particular by quickly providing access to a large amount of data acquired in large unknown environments. Tasks such as target identification & tracking, scouting, or monitoring/surveillance could benefit from this approach.

Submitted: May 7, 2024