tl;dr These tiny robots can work as a team, like all those nanobots in scifi movies.

A Harvard engineering team has developed what they call a “kilobot” (named for its ability to work in swarms of thousands, not because it will murder you in your sleep… or will it?).

These robots are small and cheap. They have short range communication capabilities. They basically vibrate on three little legs and chirp to each other with radio. That’s all they can do. 

The point of this research is to figure out how to control swarms of robots. It’s actually quite a difficult programming problem. The video demonstrates their ability to act like little ants, disperse, and follow the leader; these are pretty essential tasks for a swarm of nanobots.

Once the necessary control algorithms are developed, the task will be to make a more capable swarming robot. Something with a hand, or something that can fly like a helicopter.

So we’re nowhere near to the nanobots from I, Robot (movie) or the Dyson machines from Space Odyssey 2010, but we’re taking nanosteps.

Full story on physorg.