‘This is truly exciting: now we can order robots from the same UK companies that regularly make circuit boards for our projects—for them it is just a circuit board they can mass-produce like any other, but actually it is a complete functional robot,’ said Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner who teaches Biorobotics at ECS.

‘This also poses important research questions: how can we maintain and control thousands of robots,’ he added. ‘The students have made first steps to answer this using software tricks inspired by the way bacteria exchange code for drug resistance.’

Swarm robotics platforms are used for the investigation of emergent behaviour. They permit the study of swarm behaviour by physical simulation: providing real world constraints and experimental scope unattainable in software simulation alone.

Long-term possible applications for swarm robotics are in earthquake scenarios, environmental monitoring, and the field of space science.