This paper introduces and illustrates the theoretical underpinning and the research agenda of the SWARM-BOTS project, a robotic project sponsored by the Future and Emerging Technologies program of the European Commission (IST-2000-31010). We describe the s-bot, a small autonomous robot with self-assembling capabilities that we designed and built within the project, and we report on results of experiments in which a group of s-bots perform a variety of tasks which require self-assembling, physical cooperation and coordination among the robots.
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