The Kilobot Project:

A Low Cost Scalable Robot System for Demonstrating Collective Behaviors

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 10s of robots. To address this issue, we present 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 low-cost parts and takes 5 minutes to assemble. Furthermore, the robot design allows a single user to easily oversee the operation of a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be dificult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems. We demonstrate the capabilities of the Kilobot as a collective robot, using a 29 robot test collective to implement some popular swarm behaviors.

For more details on the robots, see the papers and videos below.
For information on how to purchase or make your own kilobot swarm,
see the links below!

Kilobot: A Low Cost Scalable Robot System for Collective Behaviors
Michael Rubenstein, Christian Ahler, Radhika Nagpal
IEEE Intl. Conf on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2012.
(pdf) and (longer but older tech report, 2011)

Funded by
WYSS Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and NSF.

Media:
Inside NOVA Blog (Adventures in Swarm Robotics)
SEAS Article (Kilobots are leaving the nest)
Wyss Institute Press Release (Nov 2011)
Slashdot Article (Nov 2011)
IEEE Spectrum blog article (June 2011).

Video:
SSR Youtube Channel




How to get your own Kilobot swarm:

Purchase some from K-Team:

K-Team Corp is making kilobots available for purchase, starting now!
See the K-Team Flier and K-Team homepage.

Kteam sells groups of robots, controllers, and charging stations - picture on the right is courtesy of Sabine Heurt, MIT. Several groups are starting to use kilobots, for example CAC Research Group at Aalto University, Finland, to test different distributed algorithms. Contact Kteam to purchase your own swarm!

Build some yourself:

If you would like to build your own Kilobots, all the software and hardware details are available under a Creative Commons attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license. The documents can be found here. The design is fairly simple and this is a great and affordable option if you plan to make a large number of robots.



Introduction to Kilobot


The following video describes the features of each Kilobot robot, and how they can be controlled in a group.



Demonstrations using a small number of Kilobots


This video demonstrates some of the capabilities of the Kilobot such as: communication, distance sensing, locomotion, and on-board computation. All demonstrations are fully autonomous, without any human controlling the robots.



Demonstrations of Kilobot collective behaivors on up to 29 robots


The following video shows a Kilobot collective of up to 29 robot demonstrating some popular collective behaviors such as follow-the-leader and foraging.