Harvard university Quote by Anonymous

““Now, with their miniature robot army, three Harvard University researchers have upped the ante, assembling a massive swarm of simple, three-legged robots that can work as a team to assemble into different shapes on command. The advance, reported Thursday in the journal ­Science, is a feat of “engineering majesty,’’ said James ­McLurkin, director of the Multi-Robot Systems Lab at Rice University, who was not ­involved in the research. “Building 1,000 robots is hard,’’ McLurkin said. “Getting 1,000 robots to work together reliably is — how’d they say it in Boston? — ‘wicked hard.’ ’’ The technology is still in the early stages. These simple ­robots, which each weigh about as much as three nickels and cost $14 in parts, cannot build a skyscraper or clean up an oil spill. But they surmount several major problems in robotics, McLurkin said. The software the researchers designed allows individual ­robots to act on their own, using only information from their neighbors to achieve goals that dwarf their thumb-sized bodies.””

— Anonymous