Developed by the University of Stuttgart and the University of Karlsruhe, these micro-robots have an entirely open-source hardware design and software. Open-sourcing, when embraced by the development community, can lead to lightning fast development times and technology breakthroughs.
To me, the obvious goal for these robot swarms would be self-replication--growing the swarm, and adapting the swarm's robots to overcome new challenges. Hyper-fast evolution of the new robot race to solve all of our problems--medical nano-bots, swarms of cleaning bots to do our dirty work.
And then the cute little swarm bots decide that they need the earth's resources more than their human masters do, and we have the War against the Machines.
Human race: meet your new worst enemy. He's kind of cute, isn't he? Learn more. >
