Swarm behaviors are common in nature, where individual organisms collaborate via perception, communication, and adaptation. Emulating these dynamics, large groups of active agents can self-organize through localized interactions, giving rise to complex swarm behaviors, which exhibit potential for applications across various domains. This review presents a comprehensive summary and perspective of synthetic swarms, to bridge the gap between the microscale individual agents and potential applications of synthetic swarms. It is begun by examining active agents, the fundamental units of synthetic swarms, to understand the origins of their motility and functionality in the presence of external stimuli. Then inter-agent communications and agent-environment communications that contribute to the swarm generation are summarized. Furthermore, the swarm behaviors reported to date and the emergence of machine intelligence within these behaviors are reviewed. Eventually, the applications enabled by distinct synthetic swarms are summarized. By discussing the emergent machine intelligence in swarm behaviors, insights are offered into the design and deployment of autonomous synthetic swarms for real-world applications.

中文翻译：

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群体自治：从代理功能化到机器智能

群体行为在自然界中很常见，个体生物体通过感知、交流和适应进行协作。通过模拟这些动态，大量的活性代理可以通过局部相互作用进行自组织，从而产生复杂的群体行为，这在各个领域都展现出了应用的潜力。这篇综述对合成群体进行了全面的总结和展望，以弥合微型个体代理与合成群体的潜在应用之间的差距。我们首先检查活性剂（合成群体的基本单位），以了解它们在外部刺激下的运动性和功能性的起源。然后我们总结了有助于群体生成的代理间通信和代理环境通信。此外，我们回顾了迄今为止报道的群体行为以及这些行为中机器智能的出现。最终，总结了不同的合成群所支持的应用。通过讨论群体行为中新兴的机器智能，我们为现实世界应用的自主合成群体的设计和部署提供了见解。本文受版权保护。版权所有