Background

Abstract

This chapter has two important objectives. First, it provides a thorough review of the literature relevant to this thesis. Second, it provides the reader with a brief reminder of the most important concepts used throughout the manuscript. As outlined in Chapter 1, we restrict our discussion to engineered distributed systems that lie between the micrometer and the centimeter scale, which we denote as SMPs. We suggest in particular that SMPs represent the natural convergence locus of two opposing tendencies observed in Micro-Electro- Mechanical System (MEMS) technology and distributed robotics. On one side of the continuum, an important body of precision manufacturing’s research aims at producing small systems of increasing complexity and capability [9, 14-16]. On the other side of the continuum, many robotic researchers attempt to create increasingly robust, dependable, and inexpensive systems by transferring complexity from individual robots to collective dynamics, generally leveraging self-organization mechanisms and environmental surrogates (e.g., fluid flows for locomotion [17], stigmergy [18], templating [19]). However, as we shall see in this chapter, this convergence holds both great promises in terms of applications and considerable challenges in terms of modeling and design.