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.
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