Thanks to a post on Leslie Marsh’ blog, I discovered this BBC article that summarises some of the swarm robotics demos that were on show at the Alife XI conference this week. The article is accompanied by a small video where small autonomous robots divide up tasks in a full decentralized manner (I can’t show here the movie since it is protected by the BBC). Beyond this performance, the interesting thing with this robots is their price. They only cost 24£ each (about 45$) according their designer, Dr Klaus-Peter Zauner from the Science and Engineering of Natural Systems Group of the University of Southampton. Indeed they are build from surface mount motors from mobile phone vibrators so the whole robot can be made on a standard production line. They do not require special components or hand assembly. More information about these robots can be found in this article on ElectronicWeekly.com.