Stigmergy and Self-Organizing Systems in Swarm Robotics: A Systematic Review

This systematic review follows the PRISMA 2020 guidelines to provide an analysis of the mechanisms of stigmergy and self-organization in swarm robotics. The purpose of this review is to conduct a bibliometric, thematic, and epistemological analysis. Journal articles addressing stigmergy, self-organization, and swarm robotics were included, whereas duplicate, irrelevant, and methodologically insufficient studies were excluded. The scientific databases searched were IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, ScienceDirect, Springer Nature, MDPI, and Wiley Online Library from June 2025 to April 2026. Three reviewers independently screened studies using predefined criteria; no formal risk-of-bias assessment or meta-analysis was performed. In total, 338 scientific works were analyzed, representing a wide range of different approaches and applications in stigmergy and self-organization in swarm robotics. The results were synthesized through four complementary analytical axes. The review highlights the significance of stigmergy and self-organization principles in providing robustness, scalability, and adaptability in swarm robots, and shows the increasing popularity of hybrid solutions based on swarm optimization, distributed learning, and adaptive control. Key limitations include the fragmentation of methodologies, the lack of benchmarking, the underrepresentation of computational and physical perspectives, and challenges in multi-scale modeling. The review provides an integrated conceptual framework and identifies future research directions. This work was supported by FAPERJ (grants 201.013/2022 and 200.434/2026) and registered with the Open Science Framework.