Researchers are looking for new ways to perform tasks on the micro- and nanoscale that are otherwise difficult to realize, particularly as the miniaturization of devices and components is beginning to reach physical limits. One new option being considered is the use of collectives of robotic units in place of a single robot to complete a task. "The task-solving capabilities of one microrobot are limited due to its small size," said Professor Thomas Speck, who headed the study at Mainz University. "But a collective of such robots working together may well be able to carry out complex assignments with considerable success." Statistical physics becomes relevant here in that it analyzes models to describe how such collective behavior may emerge from interactions, comparable to bird behavior when they flock together.

Amazon's workforce has exploded in recent years, more than doubling since the end of 2014, when it employed 154,000 people. As of the latest count, there were 306,000 employees working worldwide for the Seattle tech giant. But another group is growing just as quickly as the company's human workforce: the number of robots working alongside people in Amazon fulfillment centers. The company said this week that it has 45,000 "robotic units" operating in 20 distribution centers working with people to fill and ship customer orders. The number is up 50 percent from the 30,000 bots that Amazon reported across 13 fulfillment centers in the third quarter of 2015.

Toyota Motor Corp. is in talks to buy Boston Dynamics, a robotics unit of Google Inc., news website Tech Insider has reported. Terms for the deal are not known, but Tech Insider quoted a source familiar with the matter as saying that the ink "is nearly dry." Boston Dynamics was established in 1992 and acquired by Google in 2013. It mainly develops biped and quadruped robots. In January, the nation's leading automaker established the Toyota Research Institute in California for research and development on artificial intelligence to be used in self-driving cars and robots.