Optical networking in a swarm of microrobots

Swarm Microrobotics aims to apply Swarm Intelligence algorithms and strategies to a large number of fabricated miniaturized autonomous or semi-autonomous agents, allowing collective, decentralized and self-organizing behaviors of the robots. The ability to establish basic information networking is fundamental in such swarm systems, where inter-robot communication is the base of emergent behaviors. Optical communication represents so far probably the only feasible and suitable solution for the constraints and requirements imposed by the development of a microrobotic swarm. This paper introduces a miniaturized optical communication module for millimeter-sized autonomous robots and presents a computer-simulated demonstration of its basic working principle to exploit bio-inspired swarm strategies.