The experienced reader approaches a volume titled Handbook of X with a certain amount of trepidation. Such a volume can be an invaluable summary of leading work in an area, if the editors succeed in recruiting contributors with deep and broad expertise in the field, develop a coherent outline that situates the contribution of each contributor, and work with the contributors to see that their contributions really do provide an overview and synthesis of the facets assigned to each of them. An excellent example of such a handbook is Handbook of collective intelligence [1]. But too often, a “handbook” is just an anthology of individual research papers with no overarching vision to organize them and no coordination among the contributions. Such a volume, of which this book is an example, may enlarge the resumes of the contributors and extend the catalog of the publisher, but will be of little value to a reader seeking a concise, authoritative introduction to a field.

The book is weak both in the contributors that the editor has recruited and in the organization among the contributions. Consider first the contributors. The bibliography to the editor’s lead article, “A Survey on Swarm Robotics,” is extensive, listing articles by 162 distinct first authors and project websites with an additional 35 distinct participants. There are 60 contributors to this book, counting all the authors to each contribution. Only seven names are common to the two lists. In other words, fewer than four percent of the authors that the editor considers important enough to cite in the introduction participated in this volume. In addition, none of the contributors is among the leading researchers in this field (scientists such as Tucker Balch, Vijay Kumar, Marco Dorigo, or Radhika Nagpal, or participants at events such as the 2005 Workshop on Swarming in Natural and Engineered Systems, or members of the Jasmine swarming robotics project, some of whom are cited in the survey’s bibliography). Some of the contributors to this volume may be very promising researchers, but the leading names are notable by their absence.

The book’s 27 chapters have been assigned to ten sections, but both the categories proposed by the sections and the assignment of chapters often seem arbitrary.

Section 1, “Swarm Robotics: Survey and Security,” consists of two chapters, Tan’s introductory survey and a chapter on security in swarm robotics. One expects a survey at the start of a handbook, but why this is grouped with a chapter on a specific problem is perplexing.

There seems to be little rationale for the distinction between Section 2, “Cooperative Movement and Control,” and Section 3, “Space Deployment and Formation Control,” particularly when one of the chapters in Section 2 (chapter 4) is titled “Aerial Robot Formation Control.”

Sections 4 to 6 continue with a functional organization by offering chapters on path planning, searching for stationary targets, and searching for moving targets. Section 8, on cooperative operation and partner recruitment, is also functional in nature, but this natural group of sections is interrupted by Section 7, “Stochastic Modeling,” which discusses a development technique rather than a deployment function. It would have made more sense to switch the two, bringing Section 7 together with Section 9, “Human-Swarm Interaction,” another set of chapters on development issues.

Section 10 groups three chapters under the rubric of “Typical Application of Swarm Robotics.” One would have thought that the examples in Sections 4 to 6 and 8 were all about typical applications, so the distinctive function of this section is not clear. The last chapter in Section 10, on “Techniques in Multi-Robot Area Coverage,” would be much more useful if it were grouped with the other chapters in Section 3, which deal with the same problem.

A common shortcoming of multi-author volumes (including the otherwise excellent volume by Malone and Bernstein cited above [1]) is the lack of an integrated bibliography. This volume does offer a 73-page “compilation of references.” Unfortunately, the reference list is disordered: five articles by authors with surnames beginning with B, F, P, and S precede the As. I haven’t checked the rest of the list, but this kind of error makes a bibliography very difficult to use. The volume also has a short index, but four-and-a-half pages of index is not much help in guiding a reader through a volume of nearly 900 imperial octavo pages.

Swarm robotics is an active and complex research area of great importance for many applications. The large group of researchers featured in this volume reflects the vibrancy of the field, which would profit greatly by a true handbook to introduce others to the field. Unfortunately, this need still remains to be satisfied.