Researchers from Harvard University's "Self-Organizing Systems Research Group" have overcome problems associated with marshaling and commanding a thousand robot army.

Harvard calls its robot army "Kilobots" or "one thousand robots."

Kilobots made their debut in 2011 when there were only 25 of the swarming robots. Two years later, Harvard Robotics increased the number of Kilobots to 100.

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Today, Harvard's Kilobot Army numbers 1,024 miniature robots.

Each Kilobot is relatively cheap and costs only US$14 to construct. These small machines are capable of communicating with other bots in the swarm using infrared transmitters and receivers. They move around by vibrating their legs.

There are two essential aspects to doing research with robots that swarm such as the Kilobots, said the Harvard researchers in a recently published paper.

One is that the number of robots should be large enough to become a sizable swarm.

Many of the previous studies on swarm robotics often relied heavily on computer simulations since it costs a small fortune to build real bots. In most cases when robots are built, the swarm numbers ranged from only five to 10, and in rare cases, 100.

Harvard's 1,024 Kilobots have the advantage of being able to neglect a few individual robots, a big factor in the concept of a swarm. In a swarm, robots that break down and make mistakes can be overlooked because the collective behavior of the swarm prevails.

If, for example, one robot out of the five malfunctions, one fifth of the data will be affected. If one robot in a 1,000-robot swarm ceases to work, however, this won't matter because of the sheer numbers of bots present.

The second is that researchers require infrastructure and software to control and manage the massive number of robots.

Simple tasks with a small number of robots quickly scale to impossible with a thousand units in the swarm.

Charging the portable battery packs of the robots, for example, will require a person to plug in the charger of each robot. Harvard addressed the problem by sandwiching each robot between two conductive surfaces and passing electricity through the robots.

Another instance of trivial tasks turned inconceivable is programming each individual constituent of a group.

Instead of having to connect individual robots to computers, researchers solved this hurdle by programming the swarm using infrared signals.

The combination of the time-saving processes makes the 1,024 Kilobot horde an attainable exercise.

TagsRobotics, Harvard, Harvard University, Swarm, Robots