A robot for $14
In a world where robots increasingly tackle tasks from delivering packages to exploring other planets, researchers have long dreamed of unleashing vast swarms of low-cost, cooperative machines. This vision is precisely what the 2014 study in Robotics and Autonomous Systems addresses. In this landmark article, Michael Rubenstein, Christian Ahler, and Nick Hoff (all from Harvard University), together with Adrian Cabrera (EPFL, Switzerland) and Radhika Nagpal (Harvard University), unveil “Kilobot,” a tiny robot whose affordability, scalability, and remarkable adaptability could herald a new era of distributed robotic systems.
Why Swarms of Miniature Robots?
The relevance of this work lies in our growing appetite for large-scale solutions to complex problems. Imagine hundreds or even thousands of miniature robots collectively monitoring environmental changes, cooperatively building complex structures, or cleaning up pollutants in hard-to-reach places. In theory, such swarm intelligence offers robust and flexible responses to challenges that often stump individual machines. But in practice, building and operating large robot collectives can become prohibitively expensive and cumbersome. The Kilobot project tackles this head-on by showing that each…
