What is "kilobot"

The Kilobot is a 3.3 cm tall low-cost swarm robot invented by the Self-organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard University located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They can act in groups, up to a thousand, to execute commands programmed by users that could not be executed by individual robots. A large issue with research on robot collectives is that the cost of individual units is too high, but the Kilobot's total cost of parts is under $15. In addition to the low cost, it still has applications such as collective transport, human-swarm interaction, and shape self-assembly.