Swarm Robotics

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Overview

Swarm robotics studies how many robots can cooperate without relying on a single controller with a complete view of the team. Common approaches include local flocking and formation rules, pheromone-based exploration, consensus and market-based task allocation, and communication-free coordination; learning methods such as multi-agent reinforcement learning and imitation learning are also used. Researchers test these methods in tasks such as foraging, coverage, navigation, and search and rescue, using both simulation and physical teams of aerial and ground robots. A central challenge is making coordination scale and recover from failures while working within limits on sensing, communication, computation, safety assurance, and transfer from simulation to real robots.

Latest papers

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99 papers13 papers in the last four weeks, down 35% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Distributed Predictive Flocking for a Swarm of Miniature Vibration-Driven Robots in a Confined Arena

    Oct 26, 2026Prajol Shrestha, Siddhant Mohapatra, Filip Novkoski +4Swarm RoboticsMulti-Robot Coordination

    Pattern Recognition Lab, Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany · PULS, Institute for Theoretical Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 91058, Erlangen, Germany · GRASP, Institute of Physics B5a, University of Liège, B4000, Liège, Belgium +1

  2. Localization-Uncertainty-Aware UAV Swarm Search for GNSS-Denied Maritime Surveillance

    Oct 26, 2026Siyuan Yang, Junning Lyu, Xiaoyu He +2Swarm RoboticsMulti-Robot Systems

    School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Professor Emeritus with King’s College London, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom

  3. Lightweight Change Detection for Adaptive Collective Perception in Dynamic Environments

    Oct 25, 2026Thiemen Siemensma, Tiago Travassos, Jiacheng Zhang +1Swarm RoboticsCooperative Perception

    Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen, The Netherlands

  4. Facultative Swarming: A Capability, Not a Category, for Multi-Robot Systems

    Oct 23, 2026Ning Zhou, Edmund R. HuntMulti-Robot SystemsSwarm Robotics

    School of Engineering Mathematics & Technology, University of Bristol, Ada Lovelace Building, Tankard’s Close, Bristol BS8 1TW, United Kingdom

  5. Distributed Swarm Morphogenesis with Neural Cellular Automata

    Oct 22, 2026Ray Verma, Eliseo Ferrante, Anthony TzesSwarm RoboticsRobotic Construction

    Department of Computer Science, New York University Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates · Department of Electrical Engineering, New York University Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

  6. Emergent Cooperative Thermoregulation in Lunar Swarm Robotics

    Oct 22, 2026Anais Jeger, Harry Holt, Lennart PuckSwarm RoboticsSpace Robotics

    Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT · Advanced Concepts Team, ESA · Planetary Robotics Laboratory, ESA

  7. Probabilistic Energy Modeling Unifies Versatile Swarm Control

    Oct 22, 2026Xiang Zhou, Xiangyu Zhu, Xintong Wang +5Swarm RoboticsRobotic Control

    School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen 518107, China.

  8. Safe Multi-Robot Collaboration With Uniform Exclusion Using Trust

    Oct 20, 2026Thomas Kaminsky, Áron Vékássy, Hammad Izhar +2Resilient Multi-Robot CoordinationSwarm Robotics

    School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA · School of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, USA

  9. SenseSwarm: Swarm Exploration via Neural Structure Estimation with Shared World-Anticipation for Rapid Mapping

    Oct 16, 2026Haohua Que, Haojia Gao, Mingkai Liu +7Multi-Robot ExplorationSwarm Robotics

    Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School (SIGS), Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China. · School of Software and Microelectronics, Peking University, Beijing, China. +1

  10. Distributed Harmonic-Covariance Feedback for Hole Closure in Planar Robot Swarms

    Oct 8, 2026Jitian Liu, Subhrajit BhattacharyaDistributed ControlSwarm Robotics

    Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA.

  11. Towards Decentralized Formation of Minimum-Length Communication Networks Using Robot Swarms

    Oct 5, 2026Genki Miyauchi, Mohamed S. Talamali, Julian Rau +1Swarm RoboticsCombinatorial Optimization

    Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK · Department of Computer Science, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

  12. Visual Swarm Navigation via Deep Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Hybrid Design

    Oct 5, 2026Álvaro Díez, Fidel AznarSwarm RoboticsMulti-Robot Exploration

    Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, University of Alicante

  13. Min-Max Uniform Circle Formation by Asynchronous Mobile Robots

    Oct 4, 2026Animesh Maiti, Prakhar Shukla, Subhash BhagatMulti-Robot Formation ControlMulti-Robot Systems

    Department of Mathematics Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

  14. Defense-in-Depth at the Perception-Reasoning Interface of LLM-Centric Agentic UAV Swarms

    Oct 2, 2026Mohammadhossein Homaei, Yousef Emami, Sajad Homayoun +4AI Agent SecuritySwarm Robotics

  15. Managing Context and Communication in Distributed Agentic UAV Swarms

    Oct 1, 2026Andrea Iannoli, Ivan Zyrianoff, Angelo Trotta +2Multi-Agent LLM SystemsSwarm Robotics

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Bologna Bologna, Italy · Technology Innovation Institute (TII) United Arab Emirates

  16. Waggle-Dance-Inspired Multi-UAV Recruitment with RGB and Synthetic Event Vision

    Sep 27, 2026Zhang NengboMulti-Robot SystemsSwarm Robotics

    School of Aerospace Engineering, Engineering Campus Universiti Sains Malaysia, 14300 Nibong Tebal, Pulau Pinang, Malaysia

  17. Temperament Engineering: Designing Strategic Behavioural Diversity in Robot Swarms

    Sep 24, 2026Edmund R. HuntSwarm RoboticsMulti-Robot Coordination

    School of Engineering Mathematics & Technology, University of Bristol, Ada Lovelace Building, Tankard’s Cl, Bristol, BS8 1TW, United Kingdom.

  18. Controlling Collectives of AI Agents in Reasoning Space with Spatial Transformers

    Sep 23, 2026Frederic Vatnsdal, Roshan Gopal, Romina Garcia Camargo +2Multi-Agent LLM SystemsSwarm Robotics

    Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, USA · School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, USA · GRASP Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, USA

  19. Connectivity Preservation and Graph Stretching in Range-Only Swarm Dispersion

    Sep 23, 2026Ariel BarelSwarm Robotics

    Faculty of Computer Science, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel.

  20. Dynamic, Decentralized Spatial Code Reuse for OCDMA LiDAR in Robot Swarms

    Sep 23, 2026Mohammad Hani AlomariMulti-Robot CoordinationSwarm Robotics

    Mechanical and Maintenance Engineering Department German Jordanian University Amman, Jordan

  21. Perception-Aware Communication Middleware for Distributed Visual Perception in UAV Swarms

    Sep 21, 2026Manveen Kaur, Kevin Loi, Ifunanya Okafor +2Aerial RoboticsSwarm Robotics

    Department of Computer Science, California State University, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA · Department of Civil Engineering, California State University, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

  22. Acoustic Ellipses: Bio-Inspired Omnidirectional Echolocation in Cooperative Multi-Agent Systems using Frequency Sweeps

    Sep 17, 2026Petras Swissler, Lindsay Burke, Julia Hyland BrunoRobotic PerceptionCooperative Perception

    Faculty of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

  23. Body-Motion Control of a Simulated Aerial Swarm from a First-Person View

    Sep 16, 2026Yang Chen, Darius Giannoli, Dario FloreanoSwarm RoboticsUAV Navigation

    Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland

  24. AeroWeaver: An Embodied-Agent Harness for Weaving Aerial Skills into Distributed, Adaptive Swarm Execution

    Sep 16, 2026Jiabin Lou, Yirong Yang, Haopeng Wang +6Aerial RoboticsSwarm Robotics

    Beihang University, 37 Xueyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100191, China

  25. CC-OPI: Online Distributed Task Allocation for UAV Swarms under Communication Constraints

    Sep 16, 2026Biao Liu, Tong ZhangSwarm RoboticsMulti-Robot Task Allocation

  26. Gaussian Processes for Modelling Spatial Fields with Robot Swarms

    Sep 15, 2026Guillermo Legarda Herranz, Gianpiero Francesca, Mauro BirattariSwarm RoboticsGaussian Process Regression

    IRIDIA, Universit´e libre de Bruxelles, 1050 Brussels, Belgium · Toyota Motor Europe

  27. Calibrate Once, Fly Any Team: Residual-Grounded Low-Fidelity Training for Cooperative Drone Swarms

    Sep 15, 2026Maxim Mednikov, Oren GalAerial RoboticsSwarm Robotics

    Swarm & AI Lab (SAIL), University of Haifa, Israel

  28. AeroLat: Channel-Aware Latent Space Semantic Communication for Decentralized UAV Swarms

    Sep 15, 2026Rajdeep Ghosh, Goparaju Venkata Seshachala Sree Vatsava, Sudip MisraSemantic CommunicationWireless Communications

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721302, India

  29. CoAdapt: An LLM-based Framework for Adaptive Collaborative Perception in IIoT Robotic Swarms

    Sep 15, 2026Houssam Hajj Hassan, Antonia Maria Masucci, Lynda Zitoune +1Swarm RoboticsCommunication-Efficient Collaborative Perception

    L2S

  30. Auto-HSI: Personalized human control of a robot swarm on demand by using LLMs for online automatic code generation

    Sep 14, 2026Alessandro Nazzari, Nathan Cerisara, Dorian Tonnis +5Robotic ControlSwarm Robotics

    IRIDIA, Universit´e Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium · Department of Aerospace Science and Technology, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy · T´el´ecom Physique Strasbourg, Universit´e de Strasbourg, France +2