Hasta La Ideas

How cool would it be to have the title of “swarm robotics pioneer” on your business card? Rice University’s professor James McLurkin just happens to be one of a handful of people who can stake this claim. He recently shared details of the R-One Robot kit, a low-cost multi-robot systems platform that is, “advanced enough for multirobot research, robust enough for undergraduate and graduate education and cheap enough for K-12 outreach.” The project began shortly after he arrived at Rice in 2009 and came out of his own frustrations of using the same group of robots in his classroom for nearly 8 years. The original group of $2000 robots were in dire need of replacements, but the cost was prohibitive.

McLurkin’s R-One currently costs about $200 and he has plans to open-source the design, “so that schools and researchers can work with it and adapt it to their needs.”

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