Re: while it may look cheesy
>it would be even more impressive if these bots could sense, communicate, coordinate and execute autonomously
That has been looked into already - see the TED Talk 'Vijay Kumar: Robots that fly ... and cooperate' below. It shouldn't be too difficult to incorporate Prof. Kumar's techniques into these ball robots. The sensing hardware is almost at the 'off the shelf' level - (i.e MS Kinect et al), plus mesh networking...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ErEBkj_3PY