Now Renting: A Million Killer Robots

It could be a reality, don’t get me wrong. At some point in the future, a million killer robots could be rented for a premium price.

A Crew at Harvard has just developed robots that are literally $14 and are ordered en-masse by commands of infrared light. As such, expect a robot revolution on our hands thanks to a million “kilobots" being on the loose.

The “kilobots” are so cheap because they are meant to be bought in the thousands and respond to group commands. Imagine trying to plug each one of your million minions into a USB port? They have microchips embedded into their puny little chassis that can process the command and communicate with the other robots. That’s right they can communicate with each other.

How do they move without wheels and feet? They have a tripod of thin legs that allow the “kilobots” to stand up, and then with a functioning motor they can vibrate (much the same way that your smart phone vibrates) and literally hop across a surface to move.

It’s hard to imagine… a thousand hopping tiny robots that flash lights everywhere, but it is definitely a step in understanding how robots may communicate with each other in the future. When we don’t want to build vocal cords for artificial beings, and we don’t want to give them brains that have to process that, it might just be easier to communicate with infrared lights.

On the Harvard Website they state, “We also investigate models of self-organization in biology, specifically how cells cooperate during the development of multicellular organisms. A common theme in all of our work is understanding the relationship between local and global behavior.”

Let’s see what Harvard is up to with these things. Apparently the crew is trying to work out group commands like self-healing and transport. Like a giant real-life game of “Lemmings” or “Pikmin,” scientists are literally trying to understand how group-think could work at a robotic level.

Right now, we don't rent out thousands of $14 robots -- but we do rent out tablets (which are a lot less vicious).

That's the future that we’re all in store for.