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, researchers at Harvard University 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.