The Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies (ISTC) includes more than 80 scientists involved in interdisciplinary research ranging from cognitive science and linguistics to artificial intelligence and robotics. Within the institute, the Laboratory of Autonomous Robotics and Artificial Life (LARAL) is one of the founders of the Evolutionary Robotics field and carried out pioneering research in the area of evolution of communication and language, and in the study of collective behaviour. LARAL was involved in several successful European projects: Swarm-bots (grant IST-2000-31010) and Swarmanoid (grant 022888), dealing with the design and implementation of self-organising swarm robotic systems), and coordinated the FET project ECAgents (grant 001940), which focused on the fundamental conditions needed for the emergence of communication between collections of embodied and situated agents. Other relevant EU projects in which LARAL contributed are: iTALK (grant 214668), which studied the development of artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning; MARIO (grant 643808), dealing with autonomous motion of a robot for healthcare and ambient assisted living; DICE (grant 631297) which proposed a novel engineering methodology for the design of distributed cognitive systems; the ECHORD++ experiment SAGA (http://laral.istc.cnr.it/saga), which studied the application of swarm robotics to precision agriculture, deploying a swarm of UAVs for weed monitoring and mapping problems.