Why Swarming?

Swarms have in essence three advantages. First, because of their decentralised nature, they are easily scalable to solve problems of any size without the need of additional infrastructure. Secondly, this same property also makes swarms very robust: it does not matter if an individual unit fails, the others will keep functioning. And lastly, the individual’s simplicity allows for high flexibility of the swarm as a whole to fulfil different tasks. These properties hold for robots, but also for natural swarms. Because, in fact, we are surrounded by swarms already and barely take notice of them. Think of flocks of birds, bee queendoms or ant colonies. So maybe in the future there will be artificial swarms, assisting humanity in everyday tasks just as unnoticed as their natural pendants. They could collect weather data, monitor noise and air pollution, help with search and rescue or even collect the garbage in our streets.