Swarm robotics is the study of how to design independent systems of robots without centralized control. The emerging swarming behavior of robotic swarms is created through the interactions between individual robots and the environment. This idea emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behavior occurs.

Relatively simple individual rules can produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors. A key component is the communication between the members of the group that build a system of constant feedback. The swarm behavior involves constant change of individuals in cooperation with others, as well as the behavior of the whole group.

The design of swarm robotics systems is guided by swarm intelligence principles, which promote fault tolerance, scalability, and flexibility. Unlike distributed robotic systems in general, swarm robotics emphasizes a large number of robots. While various formulations of swarm intelligence principles exist, one widely recognized set includes:

Miniaturization is also key factor in swarm robotics, as the effect of thousands of small robots can maximize the effect of the swarm-intelligent approach to achieve meaningful behavior at swarm-level through a greater number of interactions on an individual level.

Compared with individual robots, a swarm can commonly decompose its given missions to their subtasks; a swarm is more robust to partial failure and is more flexible with regard to different missions.

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.

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.

There are many potential applications for swarm robotics. They include tasks that demand miniaturization (nanorobotics, microbotics), like distributed sensing tasks in micromachinery or the human body. A promising use of swarm robotics is in search and rescue missions. Swarms of robots of different sizes could be sent to places that rescue-workers cannot reach safely, to explore the unknown environment and solve complex mazes via onboard sensors. Swarm robotics can also be suited to tasks that demand cheap designs, for instance mining or agricultural shepherding tasks.