Harvard Licenses Technology For Tiny Swarming Robot 38
Zothecula writes "Do you think that you'll never be able to afford a robot of your own that isn't a toy? Well, if you can get Swiss robot-maker K-Team Corporation to sell you one, chances are you can easily afford a Kilobot — perhaps even a whole bunch of them. Designed and first built by Harvard University's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group, the three-legged robots aren't much larger than the 3.4-volt button cell batteries that power them, and move by vibrating across smooth, flat surfaces. They were created to study robotic swarming behavior, with the intention that tens, hundreds or even thousands of them could be used simultaneously in one experiment. Harvard has just announced that it has licensed the Kilobot technology to K-Team, which will commercially manufacture the robots so that other groups and institutions can purchase them for their own research."
Reliability (Score:4, Insightful)
Moving using vibration could be hard on those tiny legs. What is the lifetime if these things?
Why is academia permitted to sell their discoverie (Score:4, Insightful)
-s?
Isn't the whole point of academic research the free and open sharing of knowledge? But universities obtain patents then sell exclusive licenses to them, despite the research generally being done at taxpayer expense.