Centirobots, or simply centibots, were

robot A robot is a machine—especially one programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the control may be embedded within. Robots may be c ...

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 an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. ″In a robot swarm, the collective behavior of the robots results from local interactions between ...

. 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 Adv ...

and had principal investigator

SRI International SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic d ...

along with other investigators

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

's Robotics and State Estimation Lab,

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

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 Robo ...

was known for previous work in robotics, in particular

Shakey the robot Shakey the Robot was the first general-purpose mobile robot able to reason about its own actions. While other robots would have to be instructed on each individual step of completing a larger task, Shakey could analyze commands and break them down ...

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

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External links

SRI International: Centibots

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