Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient, independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm robotics. A robot swarm could act as a support in an heterogeneous system comprising other robots and/or human operators, in particular by quickly providing access to a large amount of data acquired in large unknown environments. Tasks such as target identification & tracking, scouting, or monitoring/surveillance could benefit from this approach.

翻译：大多数群体机器人研究将群体视为一个孤立的感兴趣系统。我们认为，当前将群体视为自给自足的独立系统的普遍观点限制了群体机器人学的潜在应用范围。一个机器人群体可以在包含其他机器人和/或人类操作员的异构系统中发挥支持作用，特别是通过快速提供在大型未知环境中获取的大量数据。诸如目标识别与跟踪、侦察或监控/监视等任务可以受益于这种方法。