%0 Journal Article
%T Hardware Architecture Review of Swarm Robotics System: Self-Reconfigurability, Self-Reassembly, and Self-Replication
%A Madhav Patil
%A Tamer Abukhalil
%A Tarek Sobh
%J ISRN Robotics
%D 2013
%R 10.5402/2013/849606
%X Swarm robotics is one of the most fascinating and new research areas of recent decades, and one of the grand challenges of robotics is the design of swarm robots that are self-sufficient. This can be crucial for robots exposed to environments that are unstructured or not easily accessible for a human operator, such as the inside of a blood vessel, a collapsed building, the deep sea, or the surface of another planet. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study on hardware architecture and several other important aspects of modular swarm robots, such as self-reconfigurability, self-replication, and self-assembly. The key factors in designing and building a group of swarm robots are cost and miniaturization with robustness, flexibility, and scalability. In robotics intelligence, self-assembly and self-reconfigurability are among the most important characteristics as they can add additional capabilities and functionality to swarm robots. Simulation and model design for swarm robotics is highly complex and expensive, especially when attempting to model the behavior of large swarm robot groups. 1. Introduction Over the past decade, an increasing number of research and development activities related to modular swarm robotics are attracting considerable attention and interest in industry and academia. This interest is inspired by, among other things, the emergent behavior observed in social insects such as ants, bees, wasps, and termites [1]. Self-reconfiguration, self-assembly, and self-replication are the main distinguishing characteristics of swarm robots, and a dream long held by many researchers in the field of robotics is to develop fully autonomous robotic systems with these characteristics [2]. As with many new technologies, this field is growing rapidly and becoming more complex, but there remains much to accomplish in the development of swarm robotics intelligence and swarm robotics hardware since the performance of a swarm robotics system depends greatly on its mechanical and electronic control design [3]. As a swarm multirobot system becomes more complex, each robot must still follow simple rules to perform a task or any application. Swarm robot groups are usually homogeneous and controlled by a centralized or hierarchical system, depending on the application. Most of the robot platforms used in such swarm groups have the capability to assemble themselves according to the requirements of the task. Self-assembly is a process in which a group of swarm robots comes together to form a temporary large body structure capable of performing a job that
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.robotics/2013/849606/