What are the Current Bottlenecks on developing SWARM robots to perform real world tasks?

[u/JuggernautWhich9757]

Currently working on my final year project on building open source framework to manage the full stack development of agent swarms. I want to build this to support robotics developers and enthusiasts to specifically build heterogeneous and homogeneous antigenic swarms.

I don't want this to remain a thesis or simply a good theory of what should be done, but have it actually be utilized by robotics developers. I'm very interesting in making this as useful for the community by catering to any problem across the robotics stack, from simulation to telemetry.

What does your development stack look like, and what are your pain points? Would love to know.

Reach me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anzonathan/

[u/No_Leadership4402]

the gap between simulation and reality is still massive. you can get perfect coordination in gazebo but once you put it on real hardware, latency and sensor noise just destroys everything. plus battery life is always a pain, most swarms can barely run 30 minutes before needing charge

[u/NickShipsRobots]

Agree on the sim-to-real gap. Our team built autonomous drones before – not swarms, but drone-in-a-box systems (but our sister company did drone shows as well). From my perspective, one of the biggest bottlenecks is in the hardware: integration complexity, latency, timing. In a heterogeneous swarm you multiply that by every platform. Now we’re partially addressing those problems with our sensor hub.

Cool project btw, good luck with it!

[u/OneMinusWan]

simulating real world communication latency and dropped packets between physical units is usually the biggest pain point for swarm frameworks

[u/qTHqq]

Swarm robots aren't actually useful in the real world because the cheapest hardware is still too precious to lose.

Swarms and fish schools and stuff are common in nature because they're an overall evolutionary advantage for the species.

Aside from ants and similar, most swarms just confuse and run away. The "task" they perform is minimizing attrition. They minimize the number of eaten individuals.

The reason why they need collective behavior to confuse and run away is because of the incredibly low speed of propagation of information. A wave of nearest-neighbor behavior is the fastest way for the far side of the fish school to know about the predator that showed up on the near side.

But in robotics, outside of hot war, the typical allowable attrition of individual robots is zero. They're too expensive. If you're outdoors, lost robots are also littering.

Collective multi-robot coordination is still best done under central control. For anything that's not underwater, this coordination can be done precisely and at the speed of light, without tolerating all the crazy (albeit beautiful) emergent behavior of swarm dynamics.

Others interested in swarm robotics projects can give you more advice on what they want to develop, but you asked about the bottleneck/friction keeping us from using swarms in the real world, and this is it IMO.

If we had power autonomous micro ant robots that cost a dollar and could eat to recharge like real ants, it'd be different. They'd have tons of uses. And nearest-neighbor swarm interactions are good for building structures from tiny agents.

So it's mostly a hardware/manufacturing/cost/battery problem keeping us from having useful swarm robots and it's far from being solved.

[u/XamosLife]

I feel like I should be asking you that question.