Autonomous Robots Special Issue on Swarm Robotics Guest Editors: Marco Dorigo  and Erol Sahin vol. 17 (2-3), Sept. 2004

Scope

Social insect colonies are a fascinating example of how collectively intelligent systems can be generated by the interaction of a large number of relatively simple agents. Based on the social insect metaphor, swarm intelligence (SI) has emerged as a novel approach to the design of "intelligent" systems, which emphasizes distributedness, local interaction between agents, flexibility, and robustness. The SI approach has already been successfully applied to many important problems such as the approximate solution of combinatorial optimization problems and adaptive routing in communications networks.

The special issue will be dedicated to the publication of original research related to swarm robotics, which can be loosely defined as the application of SI to the control of a "swarm" of robots. It aims to compile studies on the analysis and synthesis of embodied swarms. Differently from other applications of SI, the physical embodiment of the agents and their realistic interactions as a consequence of this embodiment are emphasized. Specifically, the submitted papers are expected to address one or both of the following questions: What are the principles behind the emergence of intelligence in natural swarms? How should individual embodied agents be designed and controlled so that the swarm as a whole can perform user-defined tasks?

• Swarm Robotics - Special Issue Editorial M. Dorigo and E. Sahin
• Algorithms for Building Annular Structures with Minimalist Robots Inspired by Brood Sorting in Ant Colonies M. Wilson, C. Melhuish, A.B. Sendova-Franks, S. Scholes
• Distributed, Physics-Based Control of Swarms of Vehicles W.M. Spears, D.F. Spears, J.C. Hamann, and R. Heil
• Macroscopic Modeling of Aggregation Experiments using Embodied Agents in Teams of Constant and Time-Varying Sizes W. Agassounon , A. Martinoli, and K. Easton
• Swarm-Bot: a New Distributed Robotic Concept F. Mondada, G. C. Pettinaro, A. Guignard, I. W. Kwee, D. Floreano, J.-L. Deneubourg, S. Nolfi, L. M. Gambardella, and M. Dorigo
• Evolving Self-Organizing Behaviors for a Swarm-Bot M. Dorigo, V. Trianni, E. Sahin, R. Groß , Th. H. Labella , G. Baldassarre, S. Nolfi, J.-L. Deneubourg, F. Mondada, D. Floreano, and L. M. Gambardella