Swarms of kilobits are comig

Picture a swarm of thousands of tiny robots deployed like insects, cleaning up a toxic waste site, burrowing through a wall to find survivors in a collapsed building or fanning out over miles to collect environmental data from a rainforest or a seascape. These visions are a bit closer to reality. The K-Team Corporation, a Swiss company that manufactures robots, has licensed tiny robots called Kilobots from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, as well as the software controls the robot swarms. K-Team will manufacture the robots and provide them to people in higher education and research. The robots themselves are less than an inch across and powered by a battery similar to that in a watch. They run around on three legs, which can vibrate independently to make them spin or move forward. To communicate with each other, they have a small infrared transceiver that bounces a signal off the floor or a table top to its neighbors in order to determine how far away they are and what they're doing.To program the robots, the team, led by computer science professor Radhika Nagpal, developed a projector that sends a signal from above, to dozens of robots at one time. So far they have only demonstrated groups of 29, but the number could easily be increased. Transmitting the programming signals from above allows the controller to contact all the robots in a group at once. A complete set of instructions can be sent to all the robots in under 40 seconds.However, programming the robots from a single location is simple. What Nagpal’s team is really aiming for is swarm-like behavior. In one demonstration the Kilobots simulate what ants might do to find food. One Kilobot is marked as “food” while another is the “nest” and the rest of them are the foragers. At first they move randomly outward from the nest, but as each of them finds the “food” they turn on a small LED and go back to the “nest.” They simulate dropping food off by turning the light off. To make Kilobots disperse, the scientists simply told them to get as far from each other as they can until they can’t “hear” each other anymore. They can also be told to synchronize with each other, producing patterns that self-organize.Maybe the super-intelligent sentient robots of science fiction won’t be big central machines like HAL or Skynet, but more like social insects -– a sobering thought when one thinks of the efficiency of a bee colony or anthill.