The robots are being developed under the Symbrion project, funded by the EU.

"A swarm could be released into a collapsed building following an earthquake," said Professor Alan Winfield from the University of the West of England, and one of the members of the Symbrion project.

"They could form themselves into teams searching for survivors or to lift rubble off stranded people."

"Some robots might form a chain allowing rescue workers to communicate with survivors while others assemble themselves into a ‘medicine bot' to give first aid."

Each robot will have wheels or tentacles to allow independent movement, along with computing power, sensors, and a transceiver that allows each robot in the swarm to communicate.

"The robots have functionality on their own, but they can also combine together or adapt and change as the situation requires," said Professor Winfield.

"The individual robots won't change physically, but they will adapt and evolve their functionality."

"Once the robots come together they will be more versatile - like a colony of cells such as those found in a jelly fish or a sponge.

"The different robots will co-operate to create the larger organism. In a sponge even if there is damage to some parts, the overall organism still survives.

"In this way the artificial robotic organisms might in theory become self-configuring, self-healing and self-optimising from both hardware and software perspectives."

Professor Winfield denied that such an autonomous swarm could malfunction, causing injury or death to humans.

"It might sound like something scary from science fiction but it's not, it's just a complex engineering system," he said.

"It will have to go through safety and validation assessments before it would be used in real life situations."

"As scientists we behave ethically but we can't determine how these things might be used."

"That is a question for wider society to determine."

Serge Kernbach, a member of the Symbrion project at Stuttgart University, estimates that the first working robot swarms will come online in the next 10 to 15 years.