Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors

By Michael Rubenstein, Christian Ahler, Radhika Nagpal. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2012

672 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In current robotics research there is a vast body of work on algorithms and control methods for groups of decentralized cooperating robots, called a swarm or collective. These algorithms are generally meant to control collectives of hundreds or even thousands of robots; however, for reasons of cost, time, or complexity, they are generally validated in simulation only, or on a group of a few tens of robots. To address this issue, this paper presents Kilobot, a low-cost robot designed to make testing collective algorithms on hundreds or thousands of robots accessible to robotics researchers. To enable the possibility of large Kilobot collectives where the number of robots is an order of magnitude larger than the largest that exist today, each robot is made with only $14 worth of parts and takes 5 minutes to assemble. Furthermore, the robot design allows a single user to easily operate a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be difficult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c7e3ddf1be1cea50aec424bd70816883c481bac

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In Computer Networks and Communications

In Mechanical Engineering

Citations in the corpus

The blockchain: a new framework for robotic swarm systems (2016, background): “rect impact on the emergence of technologies such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) [8], [46] and nanorobotics [21], [31], [9]. These examples, along with the growing development of robotic hardware [38], [11], suggest that commercial applications for swarms are within reach. However, as new swarm ”
Duckietown: An open, inexpensive and flexible platform for autonomy education and research (2017, neutral): “AERobot [8] $20 7 3 3 7 3 7 7 7 Kilobot [9] $50 7 3 7 3 7 3 3 7 3pi [10] $100 F 7 3 7 3 7 F 7 Jasmine [11] $120 3 3 3 3 3 7 3 7 LabRat [12] $120 3 3 7 7 3 7 3 F Thymio II [13] $130 7 3 3 7 3 7 7 7 Duckiebot $150 3 3 3 3 3 3 F 3 Scribbler-3 [14] $180 3 3 3 3 3 7 7 F Boe-bot [15] $180 3 3 F F 3 F 7 7 ”
Learning Robust Policies for Object Manipulation with Robot Swarms (2018, methodology): “1) Light Sensor Adjustment: In contrast to the original design developed at Harvard [25], the commercially manufactured Kilobots2 have a slightly modified design.”