Swarm robotics is a relatively new research area inspired from biological systems such as ant or bee colonies. It composes a system consisting of many small robots with simple control mechanisms capable of achieving complex collective behaviours on the swarm level such as aggregation, pattern formation and collective transportation to name a few. However, more research is still required to apply swarm robotics in practice. Within the scope of our knowledge at the moment there are no swarm robotics applications for real-life problems. The current research tends to solve specific tasks in controlled laboratory environments. In this paper we survey the existing works on swarm robotics and their applications and also analyse the potential of their applicability to solve real-life problems.