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...because Zigbee provides a lower-power mechanism for mesh communication, autonomous mobile robots are now practical.

How do you take advantage of and control hundreds to tens of thousands of these little devils? That was the topic of one of the presentations, "Robust and Self-Repairing Formation Control for Swarms of Mobile Agents," by Jimming Cheng, Winston Cheng, and Radhika Nagpal. Their animated Shapebug was simulated in the thousands to see how to build shapes (Fig. 14). Why? Imagine trying to put out a sensor net in the battlefield. Sensors fail or get destroyed, but the coverage area still needs to be addressed. This approach provides a way to do that.

From Embedded AI? in Electronic Design, July 26, 2005