Swarm Robotics: Past, Present, and Future [Point of View]

International audienceSwarm robotics takes inspiration from natural selforganizing systems such as social insects, fish schools or bird flocks, deriving rules to build robotic systems that are more robust, fault-tolerant and flexible than single robots. Over the last two decades, swarm robotics has made significant progress, providing concrete demonstrations on how robot swarms could address complex problems, and also contributing to a better understanding of how complex behaviors emerge in nature. However, as of today, only few published experiments have been able to demonstrate collective behavior in a number of robots that can effectively be compared to the size of biological swarms, and further research is needed before swarm robotics is mature enough to be employed in real world applications. Here we summarize the main lessons learned during the first two decades of research in the field and the main open problems still to be solved, such as the lack of dedicated hardware and software platforms, the need for reliable methodologies for swarm design, or how to make the best out of biological inspiration. We then present what we expect to be the main avenues of research in the future, and discuss how application demands may drive swarm robotics research, transitioning from abstract studies towards an engineering practice. Specifically, we identify precision agriculture, infrastructure inspection and maintenance, defense, space missions, entertainment and precision medicine as the application fields that will most likely drive the science and technology of robot swarms in the next three decades