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

In recent years, the research field of collective robotics has under-

gone several developmental phases: a great enthusiasm related to

reliability, 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 application

domains, such as colloidal, molecular, and bacterial systems [Kern-

bach (2010b)]; and, in turn, new methodological approaches.

Morphogenetic and epigenetic approaches are examples of such

methodologies.