Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1989) [pdf]

Fascinating to see how well a distributed architecture with relatively low processing power coupled with abundant sensors works out. Very similar indeed to biological systems, and quite humbling with respect to our current 'big data' machine learning algorithms that require entire clusters. (Although these do very different things, of course).

I expect that as these robots would become more clever, more 'implicit' centralisation would enter the structure, much as they do in biological organisms. But I don't know how far this line of research has ever been followed.