Minimalistic large-scale microrobotic systems

When advancing the concept of cooperative robotics, where multiple robotic agents assist each other in the execution of a mission, one finally arrives at swarm robotics. There does not exist a hard boundary between the two fields of cooperative and swarm robotics. However, one regards a collection of cooperative robots a swarm when the number of agents is sufficiently high so that swarm principles as observed in nature can be applied. Among these principles is the noncentralized organization of the swarm. Hence, it is not sufficient to only increase the number of robot agents to call a collection of robots a swarm. But, to demonstrate swarm behavior, the number of agents should be high enough to permit a sufficient number of coincidental robot-robot interactions with varying partners, where 100 agents, in standard laboratory conditions, as a minimum is a reasonable value.