““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.””
