Harvard Making Cheap Swarms Of Robots?

There were three obstacles to tiny swarms of robots killing us all: cost, programming, and charging them en masse. Harvard, as part of its “Erase Yale From The Map” program, has managed to solve all three with the Kilobot, which will no doubt be reprogrammed by MIT to eat that John Harvard statue once and for all.
Anyway, the Kilobot is actually pretty neat. One costs $14, it snaps together in about five minutes, and it’s easy to program using infrared. Charging is easy too: just put it between two conductive surfaces, and it gets charged up.
All joking aside, the Kilobot is actually designed to address a serious problem in robotics research: making swarms of thousands of robots is expensive and difficult. This cheap little guy will advance robotics research by taking swarm robotics out of simulation and into actual tests. Check out a few videos of it in action after the jump.



[ via the nerdswarm at Automaton]

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