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Kilobots Bring Robot Swarms to the Masses

Another Michael Crichton future is here in the form of Kilobots, quarter-sized mobile robots that are capable of communicating with each other. A product of Harvard's Self-organizing Systems Research Group, the little Kilobots offer anyone the...

Another Michael Crichton future is here in the form of Kilobots, quarter-sized mobile robots that are capable of communicating with each other. A product of Harvard's Self-organizing Systems Research Group, the little Kilobots offer anyone the opportunity to create a swarm of thousands of organized mini-machines.

The bots themselves are simple enough to be built in a few minutes for about $14 apiece. You can even "buy them directly" from Harvard if you like. They move about by vibrating their little legs. Right now the Harvard group is working with around 25 kilobots at a time, with all of the bots receiving commands from a central wireless controller. They communicate with each other by bouncing infrared beams off the ground and into a receiver on the underside of a nearby bot. This method eliminates the need for the spinning bots to be oriented in a specific fashion to communicate.

The goal, however, is studying the dynamics of a true robot swarm. The kilobots may be the first truly cheap self-organizing robots (at least as far as the public is concerned), which means researchers can now study how robotic networks work on the scale of hundreds or thousands of individuals. Only once robot groups reach numbers high enough that a human can't easily keep track of all of them can we consider them a true, self-directing robot swarm.

That type of large-scale work has previously only been possible with computer simulations, which doesn't necessarily account for the proverbial ghost in the machine that may arise when a thousand robots try to work together. As we speak, Harvard's SSR is expanding their kilobot arsenal to 1024 robots, which should make for some wild video. Assuming the kilobots organize to take over the world, of course.