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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.
Kegeleirs et al. (Tue,) studied this question.