What is A Robot Swarm: A Definition for Swarming Robotics The swarm, a type of multiagent system, has enjoyed a recent surge in popularity within the autonomous robotics field. Despite a variety of theoretical and simulated research work in the area of swarm theory and multiagent artificial intelligence, the practical use of swarms remains limited. Though many limiting factors lie on the technical front, one limiting factor may be a lack of appreciation for swarm capabilities and applications as opposed to those of conventional robotics. To help address the latter limiting factor, this paper proposes a definition of a swarm in the context of autonomous robotics, describes many realworld problems that can be addressed through use of swarms, and details current applications of swarming robotic systems.

Adaptable Platform for Interactive Swarm Robotics (APIS): A HumanSwarm Interaction Research Testbed This paper describes the Adaptable Platform for Interactive Swarm robotics (APIS)  a testbed designed to accelerate development in humanswarm interaction (HSI) research. Specifically, this paper presents the design of a swarm robot platform composed of fifty low cost robots coupled with a testing field and a software architecture that allows for modular and versatile development of swarm algorithms. The motivation behind developing this platform is that the emergence of a swarmu0027s collective behavior can be difficult to predict and control. However, humanswarm interaction can measurably increase a swarmu0027s performance as the human operator may have intuition or knowledge unavailable to the swarm. The development of APIS allows researchers to focus on HSI research, without being constrained to a fixed ruleset or interface. A short survey is presented that offers a taxonomy of swarm platforms and provides conclusions that contextualize the development of APIS. Next, the motivations, design and functionality of the APIS testbed are described. Finally, the operation and potential of the platform are demonstrated through two experimental evaluations.