Pattern formation with Kilobots

Kilobots are small swarm robots designed with low cost and scalability in mind. They originate from the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard University. Kilobots are straightforward to build, but one can purchase them as a full retail bundle, including a controller unit and charging station, through the Swiss mobile robotics company K-Team.

For the technical report, introductory videos and more information, see the Kilobot homepage.

At the CAC research group at Aalto University, we experimented with Kilobots in the context of the collective pattern formation problem. Some details of that work are showcased in the video below, featuring some gradient-based orbiting, leader election, the simplicity of robot charging, line formation by pattern-relative coordinates and a quick peek into our high-level purpose-built Kilobot simulator. Both the underwhelming Kilobot simulator and some sample Kilobot programs are available on Github. All the source code is publicly available - as is - under GPLv3.

Low quality: MPEG-4 Ogg(Theora) Webm

High(er) quality: MPEG-4 DV-AVI

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