Collective robotics is young and promising research field, where many robots work as one team, group or swarm to achieve a common goal. Collective systems provide several essential advantages such as extended reliability, scalability, flexibility and reconfigurability, capabilities for emergent and self-organizing phenomena. Depending on size, complexity and underlying principles of interaction and information transfer, there are different small-, middle- and large-scale systems, denoted as cooperative, networked, swarm and nano-robotics. All these systems utilize different mechanisms of perception, coordination and learning. Lately, research on swarm, reconfigurable and evolutionary robotics leaded to an appearance of morphogenetic systems, so-called artificial organisms, with advanced homeostatic and adaptive functionality. Collective systems became attractive for different underwater, aerial and industrial applications as well as for new areas of nano- and biological (bacterial) robotics.
This book describes basic principles underlying collective systems, discusses such issues as design of emergence, fault tolerance, self-properties, artificial evolution, appearance of robot cultures and indicates main application areas.
About the Editor:
Serge Kernbach is the head of the collective robotics group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He graduated in electronic engineering and computer science in 1994. During 1996–1998, he received several research grants. In 2007 his doctoral thesis won the faculty award as the best dissertation of the year. Since 2004, he has been a coordinator of several European research projects on the field of collective robotics. Kernbach’s main research interest is focused on artificial collective systems. He is the author and coauthor of over 100 articles in international journals and conferences and has edited a few books related to robotics. Since 2000, he has acquired for IPVS more than €3.5M in various research projects.
