Here Come the Robot Swarms (www.wsj.com)

Researchers and companies are shifting attention from human-like, centrally controlled robots to swarm robotics—swarms of simple, inexpensive machines that coordinate like ants, bees or slime molds. Instead of a single brain, each robot follows simple local rules and interacts only with nearby peers, using short-range signals (including sound or chemical “pheromone” particles) to coordinate. Those local interactions produce emergent, colony-level behaviors that can solve complex tasks such as coordinated foraging, collective transport, area coverage and adaptive pathfinding without centralized planning. For the AI/ML community this matters because swarm systems trade individual intelligence for massively parallel, robust coordination, creating new research needs and opportunities. Key technical topics include stigmergy and local-rule design, distributed consensus and self-assembly algorithms, multi-agent RL for emergent coordination, communication-constrained sensing, and formal verification of probabilistic collective behaviors. Swarms promise scalability and fault tolerance (graceful degradation if units fail) and enable applications from search-and-rescue and environmental monitoring to microrobotics and space exploration—but also raise challenges in predictability, security (adversarial disruption of local rules or signals) and regulatory oversight. Swarm robotics reframes AI work toward designing simple agents whose interactions produce reliable, verifiable group intelligence.