Particle Robots and hybrid bio-inspired robotics are enabling shapeshifting space robots and autonomous robots for warfare

Recently scinetists are considering not only individual robots but developing of groups of robots, because a swarm of collaborative robots, each one observing the problem from a different point of view, is able to solve more difficult tasks than one robot by itself. The strength of a swarm can be found in the sharing of information. Pieces of information are sent by a robot to a nearby robot and so on, connecting in this way all the robots of the swarm in a synergistic network. For example, each robot used for the exploration of unknown environment could explore by itself a little part of the search space and at the same time could share information with neighbours. In this fashion the exploration task is achieved after a shorter time than using a single robot.