  More widespread adoption requires swarms of robots to be more flexible for
real-world applications. Multiple challenges remain in complex scenarios where
a large amount of data needs to be processed in real-time and high degrees of
situational awareness are required. The options in this direction are limited
in existing robotic swarms, mostly homogeneous robots with limited operational
and reconfiguration flexibility. We address this by bringing elastic computing
techniques and dynamic resource management from the edge-cloud computing domain
to the swarm robotics domain. This enables the dynamic provisioning of
collective capabilities in the swarm for different applications. Therefore, we
transform a swarm into a distributed sensing and computing platform capable of
complex data processing tasks, which can then be offered as a service. In
particular, we discuss how this can be applied to adaptive resource management
in a heterogeneous swarm of drones, and how we are implementing the dynamic
deployment of distributed data processing algorithms. With an elastic drone
swarm built on reconfigurable hardware and containerized services, it will be
possible to raise the self-awareness, degree of intelligence, and level of
autonomy of heterogeneous swarms of robots. We describe novel directions for
collaborative perception, and new ways of interacting with a robotic swarm.
