Developmental Collective Robotics: Advantages and Challenges of Unbounded Self-Development

Abstract

In recent years, the research field of collective robotics has under-gone several developmental phases: a great enthusiasm related toreliability, speedup scalability, and collective intelligence [Mataric(1992)], [Mataric et al. (1995)]; a broad spectrum of encountered bioinspired solutions [Bonabeau et al. (1999)], [Sahin (2004)]; a skeptic phase of “looking for real applications”; new applicationdomains, such as colloidal, molecular, and bacterial systems [Kern-bach (2010b)]; and, in turn, new methodological approaches.Morphogenetic and epigenetic approaches are examples of suchmethodologies.