I will discuss the fundamental problems and practical issues underlying the deployment of large numbers of autonomously functioning vehicles operating with high-level commands from human operators. I will present decentralized controllers for a swarm of robots to generate a desired two-dimensional geometric pattern specified by any smooth function and practical insights from field experiments with UAVs and UGVs in urban environments. Finally, I will describe our recent SWARMS project whose goals are to develop a framework and methodology for the analysis of swarming behavior in biology and the synthesis of bio-inspired swarming behavior for engineered systems.