Centirobots, or simply centibots, were

robot A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions Automation, automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, co ...

s created around 2003 and designed to coordinate in large numbers in order to achieve a single goal, an early example of

swarm robotics Swarm robotics is the study of how to design independent systems of robots without centralized control. The emerging swarming behavior of robotic swarms is created through the interactions between individual robots and the environment.H. Pan; ...

. The $2.2 million project was sponsored by

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

and had principal investigator

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is a nonprofit organization, nonprofit scientific research, scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California, United States. It was established in 1946 by trustees of Stanford Univer ...

along with other investigators

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW and informally U-Dub or U Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the Uni ...

's Robotics and State Estimation Lab,

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and ActivMedia Robotics. SRI's

Artificial Intelligence Center The Artificial Intelligence Center is a laboratory in the Information and Computing Sciences Division of SRI International. It was founded in 1966 by Charles Rosen and studies artificial intelligence. One of their early projects was Shakey the ...

was known for previous work in robotics, in particular Shakey the robot and related research. There were a total of 100 robots, 80 of which were ActivMedia Robotics Amigobots and the remaining 20 were ActivMedia Pioneer 2 AT bots. The robots were used to map out an area or locate an object of interest.

References

{{reflist

External links

SRI International: Centibots

University of Washington: Centibots
2003 in robotics Multi-robot systems SRI International