  Most studies in swarm robotics treat the swarm as an isolated system of
interest. We argue that the prevailing view of swarms as self-sufficient,
independent systems limits the scope of potential applications for swarm
robotics. A robot swarm could act as a support in an heterogeneous system
comprising other robots and/or human operators, in particular by quickly
providing access to a large amount of data acquired in large unknown
environments. Tasks such as target identification & tracking, scouting, or
monitoring/surveillance could benefit from this approach.
