In psychology and in artificial intelligence, it is used to refer to the mental functions, mental processes and states of intelligent entities (humans, human organizations,
highly autonomous robots), with a particular focus toward the study of such mental processes as comprehension, inferencing, decision - making, planning and learning (see also cognitive science and cognitivism).
This was enabled by creating
autonomous robots designed to operate in large groups and to cooperate through local interactions and by developing a collective algorithm for shape formation that is
highly robust to the variability and error characteristic of large - scale decentralized systems.