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Underwater robotics is a growing field in which more research is required. A literature review has been conducted on underwater robotics, focusing on the swarm problem with this type of robotics to help overcome this gap. Consensus control of robotic swarms is focused on, with a brief description of formation control and how it can be applied in the underwater setting. The basic concepts behind Particle Swarm Optimization, Ant Colony Optimization, Bees Algorithm and Heterogeneous Swarms has also been presented. The problems that are associated with communicating underwater are shown, with some possible solutions to this problem also being presented. Possible future work is described to conclude the paper. 2015 10th System of Systems Engineering Conference (SoSE) 978-1-4799-7611-9/15/$31.00 ©2015 IEEE effective communication for a swarm. The water quality that the transceiver is in can also make a difference, as when a 75MHz transceiver is used in a chlorinated pool the range of communication is only 2.7m(9') and when the same transceiver is used in a salt water pool, the range of communication is reduced further down to 0.3m(1') [30]. This shows that having water of different conductivity levels change the way that range that communication can be achieved at.Communication can be generally split into two different categories, these being direct and indirect communication [13,21]. The most common form of communication is direct communication. This is where two or more agents have some kind of link between them, whether it be wired or wireless, that allows the two agents to transmit data from one to the other in real time. In most form of robotics this is how communication is achieved. This can be viewed as how two people have a conversation with one another.The other type of communication, indirect communication, is where other means are used to transmit the data from one robot o the other. Some methods that can be used to do is could be robot grouping, intensity of light and modifying the environment to pass a message on. This type of message is not often used as it is slow, can suffer highly from noise and can be much harder for the robot to interpret, causing situations where the robot possibly misses the message. This can be viewed as someone leaving a note for another person to find and read, as opposed to them directly speaking to each other.Due to the limitation that water imposes on communication other forms of communication have been

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