Programming Robot Swarms to take Inventory

This one of the more unusual innovation efforts we examined.   Could we program swarms of simple devices to perform complex, time consuming tasks?  Taking video inventory was one of the examples often suggested. It did not succeed then, but perhaps it would if you had a programming language for robot swarms. Still thinking about this. It has been shown that the bio-mimicry model of a swarm can solve some relatively difficult problems.  It is an example of a complexity model.  But I have yet to see such a swarm model used for a real industrial problem.  Know any?