A Thousand Kilobots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Harvard's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group—describe their thousand-robot swarm in a paper published today in Science (they actually built 1024 robots). In the past, researchers have only been able to program at most a couple hundred robots to work together. Now, these researchers have programmed the biggest robot swarm yet. Alone, the simple little robot can't do much, but working with 1,000 or more like-minded fellow bots, it becomes part of a swarm that can self-assemble into any two-dimensional shape. These are some of the first steps toward creating huge herds of tiny robots that form larger structures—including bigger robots."

Comments

Killbots

[brunes69]

I mis-read and thought this said "A Thousand Killbots Self-Assemble Into Complex Shapes..."

Now THAT would be interesting!

640k?

[Bodhammer]

640 kilobots ought to be enough for anybody.

Re:640k?

[Neil Boekend]

My dear, we are the grey goo.

Expensive little suckers

[chispito]

I remember, as TFA mentions, these wondrous little $14 robots. Except if you're not Harvard, the distributors are charging about $125 for each one, and hundreds more for the programmer and charger.

Why is this better than simulation?

[dpbsmith]

It's sort of cool, I guess, but I don't see the benefit of actually building physical robots rather than running a simulation. What has been achieved in the real world doesn't seem to have any practical application, even as an advertising gimmick or a work of sculpture.

I can't imagine sending out 100,000 of these gadget to do the half-time show at a football game, for example.

I didn't sense that this was just the beginning and that the same devices that self-assemble predetermined shapes could, with more advance software, harvest wheat or perform laser surgery.

When they reach the point where the simulated behavior actually has some real-world utility, THEN it makes sense to build them.

Re:What's the additional challenge here?

[Rockoon]

what was learned by actually building them?

How to successfully apply for grant money.

Why is this better than simulation?

[sabt-pestnu]

The difference between theory and practice is
- in theory, there is no difference
- in practice, there is.

A simulation of self-assembling robots is theory.
An actual pile of 1,024 self-assembling robots is practice.

Less tritely, you have zero information about flaws in your simulation until you try to apply it to/in the real world. Your simulation is excellent at helping you identify logical flaws in your design. But if you fail to account for something (crosswinds, say), then your simulation simply won't help you find it.

It's that whole "unknown unknowns" thing, man.

One thousand kilobots?

[ArcadeMan]

Is it one thousand kilobots (1000000) or one thousand killbots (1000) or one thousand kibibots (1024000)?

In the article they say it's 1024 bots, so whoever typed that title is probably smoking supercapacitors.

Re:What's the additional challenge here?

[Remus Shepherd]

I think they're building these robots to solve the problem of how to make these robots. A pixel in a game of Life is easy to maintain -- it has an x,y coordinate and immediately knows all its neighbor's positions. A robot has to identify all its neighbors and then localize itself using infrared and communication time lags. That's a challenge. The only way to meet that challenge is to build the robots and figure out how to make them work.