Robot swarm organises itself like ants or amoebas

Ah, cool.

Credit: Michael Rubenstein/Harvard University

Sure, they’re just cute on their own - but a swarm of 1,024 tiny robots can achieve mighty things.

Those madcap scientists over at Harvard have come up with something cool and creepy in equal measure - a swarm of tiny robots that can organise itself into complex shapes.

This self-organizing swarm was created in the lab of Radhika Nagpal, the Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).

As reported in the Harvard Gazette, a computer scientist sends a single command to the bots via an infrared light. It could be: “Form a sea-star shape” for example. The little bots start blinking at each other and then gradually arrange themselves into the five-pointed star pictured above.

These are Kilobots, simple little bots that work together to complete tasks, something like ants, amoebas and cuttlefish do in nature.

As the Gazette reports, “To computer scientists, (the kilobots) represent a significant milestone in the development of collective artificial intelligence (AI).”

Credit: Michael Rubenstein/Harvard University

How do they do it? Back to the Harvard Gazette: “Four robots mark the origin of a coordinate system. All the other robots receive a 2-D image to mimic, and then, using very primitive behaviors — following the edge of a group, tracking a distance from the origin, and maintaining a sense of relative location — they take turns moving toward an appropriate position.”

So now!

Also, just to go off on a little tangent, we are reminded of this guy: