Swarm behaviour

Related papers: 20

About

Swarm behaviour refers to the collective, emergent intelligence that arises when large numbers of simple agents interact locally with one another and their environment, without centralized control. Inspired by natural systems such as ant colonies, bird flocks, and fish schools, swarm behaviour produces sophisticated group-level patterns — including flocking, foraging, self-assembly, and coordinated navigation — from relatively simple individual rules. In robotics and AI, swarm behaviour underpins the design of multi-robot systems where decentralized coordination allows many low-cost, limited robots to collectively accomplish tasks that would be impossible for a single agent, such as search-and-rescue, environmental monitoring, and precision agriculture. The same principles drive particle swarm optimization, a widely used computational technique for solving complex nonlinear problems. Swarm approaches matter because they offer inherent scalability, fault tolerance, and flexibility: the system degrades gracefully when individual units fail and can adapt dynamically to changing conditions. As hardware costs fall and aerial, ground, and micro-scale swarms become increasingly feasible, swarm behaviour is emerging as a foundational paradigm for robust, distributed autonomous systems.

Top Cited Papers

A new optimizer using particle swarm theory

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Programmable self-assembly in a thousand-robot swarm

Michael Rubenstein, Alejandro Donohué-Cornejo, Radhika Nagpal

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MASON: A Multiagent Simulation Environment

Sean Luke, Claudio Cioffi‐Revilla, Liviu Panait, Keith Sullivan, Gabriel Balan

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Swarm Intelligence in Cellular Robotic Systems

G. Beni, Jing Wang

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Swarm Robotics: From Sources of Inspiration to Domains of Application

Erol Şahi̇n

Citations: 945 • 2005

A Survey on Aerial Swarm Robotics

Soon‐Jo Chung, Aditya A. Paranjape, Philip Dames, Shaojie Shen, Vijay Kumar

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Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors

Michael Rubenstein, Christian Ahler, Radhika Nagpal

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The biological principles of swarm intelligence

Simon Garnier, Jacques Gautrais, Guy Théraulaz

Citations: 597 • 2007

Optimized flocking of autonomous drones in confined environments

Gábor Vásárhelyi, Csaba Virágh, Gergő Somorjai, Tamás Nepusz, A. E. Eiben, Tamás Vicsek

Citations: 559 • 2018

Swarm of micro flying robots in the wild

Xin Zhou, Xiangyong Wen, Zhepei Wang, Yuman Gao, Haojia Li, Qianhao Wang, Tiankai Yang, Haojian Lu, Yanjun Cao, Chao Xu, Fei Gao

Citations: 539 • 2022

Swarm Robotic Behaviors and Current Applications

Melanie Schranz, Martina Umlauft, Micha Sende, Wilfried Elmenreich

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A review of swarm robotics tasks

Levent Bayındır

Citations: 434 • 2015

Decentralized estimation and control of graph connectivity for mobile sensor networks

Panpan Yang, Randy A. Freeman, Geoff J. Gordon, Kevin Lynch, Siddhartha S Srinivasa, Rahul Sukthankar

Citations: 420 • 2009

Towards a swarm of agile micro quadrotors

Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger, Caitlin Powers, Vijay Kumar

Citations: 418 • 2013

Ultra-extensible ribbon-like magnetic microswarm

Jiangfan Yu, Ben Wang, Xingzhou Du, Qianqian Wang, Li Zhang

Citations: 411 • 2018

Swarmanoid: A Novel Concept for the Study of Heterogeneous Robotic Swarms

Marco Dorigo, Dario Floreano, Luca Maria Gambardella, Francesco Mondada, Stefano Nolfi, Tarek Baaboura, Mauro Birattari, Michaël Bonani, Manuele Brambilla, Arne Brutschy, Daniel Burnier, Alexandre Campo, Anders Lyhne Christensen, Antal Decugniere, Gianni A. Di, Frederick Ducatelle, Eliseo Ferrante, Alexander Förster, J. M. Gonzáles, Jérôme Guzzi, Valentin Longchamp, Stéphane Magnenat, Nithin Mathews, Marco Montes de, Rehan O’Grady, Carlo Pinciroli, Giovanni Pini, Philippe Rétornaz, James F. Roberts, Valerio Sperati, Timothy Stirling, Alessandro Stranieri, Thomas Stützle, Vito Trianni, Elio Tuci, Ali Emre Turgut, Florian Vaussard

Citations: 408 • 2013

Human Interaction With Robot Swarms: A Survey

Andreas Kolling, Phillip Walker, Nilanjan Chakraborty, Katia Sycara, Michael Lewis

Citations: 401 • 2015

Region-based shape control for a swarm of robots

Chien Chern Cheah, Saing Paul Hou, J.-J.E. Slotine

Citations: 387 • 2009

From Swarm Intelligence to Swarm Robotics

G. Beni

Citations: 376 • 2005