Swarm robotics is an approach to coordinate a large number of robots using collective behavior controllers. The bio-inspired intelligence paradigm of swarm robots has proven to have very interesting properties such as robustness, flexibility and the ability to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization. Swarm robots are considered as complex mechatronic systems characterized by many independent components whose low-level actions produce collective high-level results. Predicting high-level outcomes (swarm system level) using low-level rules (independent robots level) is a major known and open challenge. Similarly, finding low-level rules that give specific high-level results is generally even less understood. Designers thus find it difficult to solve complex problems exploiting parallelism and self-organization.
The objective of this thesis is to develop a well-founded systematic approach for the specification, modeling, design, realization, verification, validation and operation of a swarm robotic system.