Kilobots
Collective Robotic Systems for Physically Simulating Biological Self-Organization
Kilobots are simple low cost robots capable of only elementary sensing and movement. But because they can communicate with one another, they can execute complex self-organization as a swarm. They were developed by Radhika Nagpal’s lab at Harvard University.
We held a kilobot workshop at UCSF that brought together molecular & cell biologists from UCSF with roboticists from Harvard. We explored how kilobots could be used to simulate cellular scale self-organizational processes. We now have a 100-kilobot swarm here at UCSF.
We are interested in using kilobots as an educational tool for physically simulating collective molecular and cellular behaviors.
