The present paper studies, the progress in the research of nature inspired swarm robotics. Swarm robotics is a robotic technology inspired from the nature (natural swarms). In this, an artificial intelligence aided coordination approach is used for the self-organization and decentralization of multiple robots. Being a promising centralized approach with fault tolerance, redundancy and scalability potentials, they can even work when it is technically infeasible to set up the infrastructure required to control the robots in a centralized way. But the design of individual robot level practice to achieve a desired collective behavior is really difficult as it is hard to predict the simultaneous interactions between large numbers of individual robots. In order to explore the possibilities to make a better progress in this technology, the existing modeling, analysis methods and the challenges has to be studied first. Followed by this, a study on swarm communication and the hardware units including sensors and actuators was done. Further the existing swarm platforms are compared based on hardware detailing, advantages and limitations. This comparative study can pay way to a better design of a multi-robot system for the applications like rescue operation, surveillance, oil spills, military applications etc. © 2018 The Author(s).