Swarm Foraging Review: Closing the Gap Between Proof and Practice

Purpose of Review We review recent research on swarm robot foraging and contextualize it with foundational work. Recent work can be divided into two complementary camps: self-organizing algorithms that provide practical gains and analytical research focus on theoretical proofs. Recent Findings Encouragingly, the convergence between theory and practice is evident in analytical work on the scaling of transportation networks and in behavioral grammars that give formal insight into emergent properties of foraging. Augmented reality has enabled virtual pheromones to be used with hardware, blurring the line between physical and simulation experiments. Summary In this review we highlight bio-inspired and self-organizing approaches to swarm foraging and contrast them with approaches that can provide theoretical proofs, but which abstract away important features from foraging in real-world environments.