Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This approach emerged on the field of artificial swarm intelligence, as well as the biological studies of insects, ants and other fields in nature, where swarm behaviour occurs.

The research of swarm robotics is to study the design of robots, their physical body and their controlling behaviors. It is inspired but not limited by the emergent behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. 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.

Magnus B. Egerstedt (born June 28, 1971) is a Swedish-American roboticist, a Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, and an Associate Director of Research for the Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines.

Egerstedt is a major contributor to the theory of hybrid and discrete event systems, and in particular, the control of multi-agent systems.

Magnus Egerstedt was born in Täby Municipality, Stockholm, Sweden in 1971 and attended Stockholm University. He received his B.A. in Theoretical Philosophy in 1996, specializing in language philosophy and with a thesis titled Implicit Knowledge and Public Mathematical Meaning. Egerstedt then joined the Division of Optimization and Systems Theory at the Royal Institute of Technology, where he received in 1996 a M.S. in Engineering Physics. During this period, Egerstedt visited Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas and completed his M.S. thesis A Model of the Combined Planar Motion of the Human Head and Eye. In 2000, Egerstedt completed a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics under the advisement of Xiaoming Hu and Anders Lindquist for the thesis Motion Planning and Control of Mobile Robots. At KTH, Egerstedt was involved with the Intelligent Service Agent demonstrator at CVAP, KTH as well as a radio-controlled car at OptSyst, KTH.

James McLurkin (1972 - ) is an engineering professor at Rice University specializing in swarm robotics. He appeared on Nova on PBS. In addition, he is a winner of the 2003 Lemelson-MIT Prize and completed his Ph.D. in computer science in May 2008 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

James and his robots are featured on PBS Nova episode in 2005: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/james-mclurkin.html

In 1995, McLurkin was invited by the Smithsonian Institution to speak about his life and career in a presentation for schoolchildren sponsored by the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

James graduated from Baldwin Senior High School, Baldwin, NY 11510 in 1990.^{[citation needed]}