Building Kilobots In-house for Shape-Formation

This paper presents the building procedures of Kilobots, one kind of small robots with a 33-mm diameter, for shape formation and potentially other swarm robotics simulations in a large scale. This paper describes the challenges and solutions in building and debugging Kilobots, as well as the planned shape formation operation. Kilobots are built in-house using reflow soldering for surface mount components and hand soldering for through-hole components. A systematic debugging procedure, as well as the most commonly seen issues and their solution are described based on building and testing experience. In shape formation, phototaxis (moving towards or away from light) can be the driving force in the reductive approach, and yet the original Kilobot design allows such movement only in a dark room, because the ambient light sensor output is saturated at a low illumination level. An experiment is conducted to examine the saturation lux level versus the phototransistor's collector resistance, and a new value of collector resistance is proposed and implemented in our Kilobots, to ease the experiment lighting condition, making it more lenient and convenient than before, even at daylight.