Towards exogenous fault detection in swarm robotic systems

It has long been assumed that swarm systems are robust, in the sense that the failure of individual robots will have little detrimental effect on a swarm's overall collective behaviour. However, Bjerknes and Winfield [1] have recently shown that this is not always the case, particularly in the event of partial failures (such as motor failure). The reliability modelling in [1] shows that overall system reliability rapidly decreases with swarm size, therefore this is a problem that cannot simply be solved by adding more robots to the swarm. Instead, future large-scale swarm systems will need an active approach to dealing with failed individuals if they are to achieve a high level of fault tolerance.