Survey on Decentralized Modular Swarm Robots and Control Interfaces

This paper presents the results of a comprehensive investigation of the current state of swarm robotics research, organizing and classifying that research into a preliminary taxonomy. We aim to provide an analysis of existing swarm systems in an attempt to define the starting point of potential algorithms leading to the development of a new swarm system platform and software design. In other words, we provide a detailed summary of systems that have been classified under four main categories of the general multi-robot system platforms, namely: selfreconfigurable, modular, self-replicating, and swarm systems. We present a preliminary taxonomy for swarm robotics and classify existing studies into this taxonomy. In later sections of this survey, we do not only address the fact that there is a shortage of available software packages and interfaces that are integrated with capabilities to distribute decentralized algorithms over the swarm system, but also we introduce the challenges of having such software/application for controlling multiple expandable and reconfigurable swarm agents.

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