A Thousand Kilobots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes

When Harvard roboticists first introduced their Kilobots in 2011, they’d only made 25 of them. When we next saw the robots in 2013, they’d made 100. Now the researchers have built one thousand of them. That’s a whole kilo of Kilobots, and probably the most robots that have ever been in the same place at the same time, ever [UPDATE: Some readers wrote in to say they disagree that this is the most robots in the same place at the same time ever. Rod Brooks says he was once in a warehouse in China with more than a thousand Roombas in storage. “Admittedly, they are in boxes rather than out running around and cooperating,” he says, “but it was a lot of robots!” Another reader claims that SRI has more than 1024 microrobots operating simultaneously. If you know of other massive robot swarms like that, let us know.]

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The researchers—Michael Rubenstein, Alejandro Cornejo, and Professor Radhika Nagpal of Harvard’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group—describe their thousand-robot swarm in a paper published today in Science (they actually built 1024 robots, apparently following the computer science definition of “kilo”)….[Read more]