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research article

Kilobot: A low cost robot with scalable operations designed for collective behaviors

Rubenstein, Michael
•
Ahler, Christian
•
Hoff, Nick
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2014
Robotics And Autonomous Systems

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, an open-source, 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 min 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. We demonstrate the capabilities of the Kilobot as a collective robot, by using a small robot test collective to implement four popular swarm behaviors: foraging, formation control, phototaxis, and synchronization. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

  • Details
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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.robot.2013.08.006
Web of Science ID

WOS:000337652200003

Author(s)
Rubenstein, Michael
Ahler, Christian
Hoff, Nick
Cabrera, Adrian
Nagpal, Radhika
Date Issued

2014

Publisher

Elsevier Science Bv

Published in
Robotics And Autonomous Systems
Volume

62

Issue

7

Start page

966

End page

975

Subjects

Modular robot

•

Multi-robot system

•

Robot collectives

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
IIE  
Available on Infoscience
August 29, 2014
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/106387
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