[R]esearchers — Michael Rubenstein, Alejandro Cornejo, and Professor Radhika Nagpal of Harvard’s Self-Organizing Systems Research Group — describe their thousand-robot swarm in a paper published in Science.

Each Kilobot is a small, cheap-ish ($14) device that can move around by vibrating their legs and communicate with other robots with infrared transmitters and receivers.

There are so many robots here that the importance of any individual robot is close to zero: robots can screw up, robots can break down, but there are so many of them that their collective behavior prevails.

There is a lot you could do with these, but one of the more interesting usages is to create self-assembling structures that are dynamically self-repairing, even to the point of phoning home when they need replacements.

What could possibly go wrong with this line of research? One word: Skynet. Just saying.

Via IEEE Spectrum for the full article.