> “I originally thought I would never have hardware,” she said. “But the reason I thought that was a robot cost $100,000. [Today] I can build novel robots for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s a routine thing in my lab. I have a thousand robots, at $20 [each].”
— Radhika Nagpal
> Nagpal has licensed kilobot technology to K-Team, a manufacturer of small mobile robots. Today, 10 other labs around the world own kilobots, and two have 1,000-kilobot swarms
They're good for researching self-organizing behaviors to create code that can be used in more useful bots. The more useful bots may have more robust locomotion and/or other capabilities like sensing but will correspondingly be a little or a lot more expensive.
> “I originally thought I would never have hardware,” she said. “But the reason I thought that was a robot cost $100,000. [Today] I can build novel robots for a couple of hundred dollars. That’s a routine thing in my lab. I have a thousand robots, at $20 [each].”
— Radhika Nagpal
> Nagpal has licensed kilobot technology to K-Team, a manufacturer of small mobile robots. Today, 10 other labs around the world own kilobots, and two have 1,000-kilobot swarms