Swarm systems investigate how coordinated behavior can emerge from many simple agents without centralized control. Early large-scale demonstrations, such as the 72 autonomous robots deployed at Expo 2000—developed as part of a project with a budget exceeding €15 million—showed that distributed machines could navigate safely among humans while maintaining real-time coordination, a rare technical achievement at the time. More recent work extends these principles beyond mobile robots, exploring how synchronization, timing, and field-based interaction can distribute intelligence without relying on batteries, RF communication, or centralized infrastructure. In this context, Smart Dust can be understood as an evolution of swarm concepts, shifting coordination from physical motion to ambient, persistent sensing embedded directly in the environment.
