Jasmine

Overview

An open-hardware micro-robot from the I-Swarm era, designed by Sergey Kornienko and colleagues at the University of Stuttgart so that a lab could build a swarm of 100 or more robots for around 100 euro each. Robots work together without any central computer. Each one sends and receives short infrared messages on six channels around its body, reaching about 15 to 30 cm at over 1,000 bits per second, and the channel a message arrives on tells it which side the sender is on. The same infrared parts double as distance sensors, so swarm behaviors such as aggregation, collective perception and docking for recharge run entirely from local contact between neighbors. The catch is that it was never sold, building one means hand-assembling small SMD boards from a parts list that is now two decades old, and the project has been hosted independently since the University of Stuttgart stopped hosting it in 2012.