If you’re interested in studying real-world robot swarms, the unit cost is everything. Reportedly, most commercial swarm bots cost $100 or more, so this innovative design from Michael Rubenstein, Nicholas Hoff, and Radhika Nagpal of the Harvard’s Self Organizing Systems Research Group represents an order-of-magnitude savings over existing platforms. They call it “Kilobot,” and besides low cost, it is designed for rapid assembly (<5 min/unit) and group charging using plates that engage the top and bottom of the entire swarm at once. From their technical report (PDF):
While these robots are low-cost, they still have abilities similar to other collective robots. These abilities include: differential drive locomotion, on-board computation power, neighbor-to-neighbor communication, and neighbor-toneighbor distance sensing. These abilities are achieved at low cost mainly through the use of vibration based locomotion and a simple range only sensor.
The embedded video shows swarms of up to 29 Kilobots (about $410 dollars altogether) engaged in “foraging” and “follow-the-leader” behaviors. The group plans to produce a 1024-bot swarm in the near future. [via Hack a Day]
12 thoughts on “Harvard’s $14 Swarm-bot Design”
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Did anyone else keep seeing “Killbot”?
How do I get one.
Kind of late, but better than never:
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/ssr/projects/progSA/kilobot.html
and
ftp://ftp.deas.harvard.edu/techreports/tr-06-11.pdf
Happy Botting!
How do I get one.
Very cool, anyone got any more info re designs and where to obtain parts from?
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