The key to getting robots to perform complex tasks may not be in making them smarter. Instead, it may be in getting a lot of dumb robots to act together.

That’s the idea behind a project being led by the University of Pennsylvania, funded by a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense. The purpose of the Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project is to create software and tools that enable a person to direct a swarm or swarms of small robots.

If it succeeds, the project would enable the creation of large groups of robots that can act intelligently, even though the robots making up the groups aren’t too bright.