automatic off-line design of robot swarms: a manifesto

Designing collective behaviors for robot swarms is a difficult endeavor due to their fully distributed, highly redundant, and ever-changing nature. To overcome the challenge, a few approaches have been proposed, which can be classified as manual, semi-automatic, or automatic design. This paper is intended to be the manifesto of the automatic off-line design for robot swarms. We define the off-line design problem and illustrate it via a possible practical realization, highlight the core research questions, raise a number of issues regarding the existing literature that is relevant to the automatic off-line design, and provide guidelines that we deem necessary for a healthy development of the domain and for ensuring its relevance to potential real-world applications.