> It's an interesting challenge to think about: you have a thousand, or a million, small little robots - how to get them to do something useful as a group? Thi

> It's an interesting challenge to think about: you have a thousand, or a million, small little robots - how to get them to do something useful as a group? This was a big focus of a lot of the ALife research in the late 90s and early aughts. Cellular automata, swarming systems, etc. You can generally start with anything coming out of University of New Mexico and bounce around the citation graph of an interesting-sounding paper. You might also want to check out Dave Ackley's T2 Tile project and some of the youtube videos he has put out over the past few years. One thing he is very clear about is addressing robustness in the face of component failure (e.g. his 'Moveable Feast Machine' and 'Demon Horde' stuff is rather fun to watch as it responds to random and widespread failures.) Most of the work in this area is clearly bio-inspired, but why re-invent the wheel when you can steal from the best available examples...