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Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Citations
Cited by
(2017) · DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) · Cited by 288
Zooids: Building Blocks for Swarm User Interfaces
Le Goc, M., Kim, L. H., Parsaei, A., Fekete, J.-D., Dragicevic, P., & Follmer, S. (2016) · Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology · doi:10.1145/2984511.2984547 · Cited by 267
A review: Can robots reshape K-12 STEM education?
Karim, M. E., Lemaignan, S., & Mondada, F. (2015) · 2015 IEEE International Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO) · doi:10.1109/arso.2015.7428217 · Cited by 145
Collective behavior from surprise minimization
Heins, C., Millidge, B., Da Costa, L., Mann, R. P., Friston, K. J., & Couzin, I. D. (2024) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2320239121 · Cited by 55
AERobot: An affordable one-robot-per-student system for early robotics education
Rubenstein, M., Cimino, B., Nagpal, R., & Werfel, J. (2015) · 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) · doi:10.1109/icra.2015.7140056 · Cited by 38
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Metadata
- Authors
- Rubenstein, M., Ahler, C., & Nagpal, R.
- Venue
- 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2012-05
- Pages
- 3293-3298
- ISSN
- 1050-4729 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1982636603
- Cited by
- 629
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 82.44
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
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- Rubenstein, M., Ahler, C., & Nagpal, R. (2012). Kilobot: A low cost scalable robot system for collective behaviors. 2012 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. https://doi.org/10.1109/icra.2012.6224638
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