IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013 - 60

Swarmanoid
A Novel Concept for the Study of Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms

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By Marco Dorigo, Dario Floreano,
Luca Maria Gambardella,
Francesco Mondada, Stefano Nolfi,
Tarek Baaboura, Mauro Birattari,
Michael Bonani, Manuele Brambilla,
Arne Brutschy, Daniel Burnier,
Alexandre Campo, Anders Lyhne
Christensen, Antal Decugnière,
Gianni Di Caro, Frederick Ducatelle,
Eliseo Ferrante, Alexander Förster,
Jerome Guzzi, Valentin Longchamp,
Stéphane Magnenat, Javier Martinez
Gonzales, Nithin Mathews,
Marco Montes de Oca, Rehan O'Grady,
Carlo Pinciroli, Giovanni Pini,
Philippe Rétornaz, James Roberts,
Valerio Sperati, Timothy Stirling,
Alessandro Stranieri, Thomas Stützle,
Vito Trianni, Elio Tuci, Ali Emre Turgut,
and Florian Vaussard

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2013.2252996
Date of publication: 13 September 2013

60

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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DECEMBER 2013

warm robotics systems are
characterized by decentralized control, limited communication between robots, use
of local information, and
emergence of global behavior. Such systems have shown their potential for
flexibility and robustness [1]-[3].
However, existing swarm robotics systems are by and large still limited to
displaying simple proof-of-concept
behaviors under laboratory conditions.
It is our contention that one of the factors holding back swarm robotics
research is the almost universal insistence on homogeneous system components. We believe that swarm robotics designers must embrace heterogeneity if they ever want swarm robotics systems to approach the complexity
required of real-world systems.
To date, swarm robotics systems have almost exclusively comprised physically and behaviorally undifferentiated agents. This design decision has its
roots in ethological models of self-organizing natural systems. These models
serve as inspiration for swarm robotics system designers, but are often highly
abstract simplifications of natural systems and, to date, have largely assumed
homogeneous agents. Selected dynamics of the systems under study are
shown to emerge from the interactions of identical system components,
ignoring the heterogeneities (physical, spatial, functional, and informational)
that one can find in almost any natural system.
The field of swarm robotics currently lacks methods and tools with
which to study and leverage the heterogeneity that is present in natural systems. To remedy this deficiency, we propose swarmanoid, an innovative
swarm robotics system composed of three different robot types with complementary skills: foot-bots are small autonomous robots specialized in
moving on both even and uneven terrains, capable of self-assembling and of
transporting objects or other robots; hand-bots are autonomous robots
capable of climbing some vertical surfaces and manipulating small objects;
and eye-bots are autonomous flying robots that can attach to an indoor ceiling, capable of analyzing the environment from a privileged position to
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2013
