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.

Access	Page	Title	Price
		Front Matter Download PDF	Free

Researchers in robotics, adaptive and bio-inspired systems, evolutionary computation, bioinformatics