Editing Swarm robotics (section)

== History ==
The phrase "swarm robotics" was reported to make its first appearance in 1991 according to Google Scholar, but research regarding swarm robotics began to grow in early 2000s. The initial goal of studying swarm robotics was to test whether the concept of [[stigmergy]] could be used as a method for robots to indirectly communication and coordinate with each other.<ref name=":1" />

One of the first international projects regarding swarm robotics was the SWARM-BOTS project funded by the European Commission between 2001 and 2005, in which a swarm of up to 20 of robots capable of independently physically connect to each other to form a cooperating system were used to study swarm behaviors such as collective transport, area coverage, and searching for objects. The result was demonstration of self-organized teams of robots that cooperate to solve a complex task, with the robots in the swarm taking different roles over time. This work was then expanded upon through the Swarmanoid project (2006–2010), which extended the ideas and algorithms developed in Swarm-bots to heterogeneous robot swarms composed of three types of robots—flying, climbing, and ground-based—that collaborated to carry out a search and retrieval task.<ref name=":1" />