They look vaguely like miniature hockey pucks skittering along on three pinlike metal legs, but a swarm of small robots called Kilobots at a laboratory at Harvard University is making a little bit of history for automatons everywhere.
Researchers who created a battalion of 1,024 of these robots said on Thursday that the minimachines can communicate with one another and organize themselves into two-dimensional shapes such as letters of the alphabet. Much smaller groups of robots have been able to carry out similar tasks, but never a group this size.
The Kilobots are told by the researchers via an infrared transmitter to do a certain job. The robots then do it collectively without further input from a human being.