What do you get when you put 1,000 robots together and create a swarm? You get a single-minded robot army that can handle almost any task.

Inspired by nature, particularly ants and bees, Harvard's Wyss Institute looked at creating a swarm of robots with behaviors specific to swarming, specifically synchronization.

Each robot, called a Kilobot, is tiny, about the size of a penny. Researchers created each Kilobot in a way that makes manufacturing them fast and inexpensive. Infrared light from a controller programs the swarm at once and the robots communicate with each other via infrared signals.

Researchers put together a collective of 1,024 of these robots and programmed them to work together as a group, rather than on an individual level. The robots have an operating system that is hive-like: users can program the robots to perform a singular task, without each robot needing separate programming and instructions.

Although other researchers have put together swarms of robots before, Harvard's robot swarm is the largest and most cooperative swarm to date.

Once the team had the robots, they created an algorithm that allowed the robots to cooperate for assembling themselves into shapes. Four robots act as "seeds" marking the shape. Those four send a message to other robots that gives them coordinates as to how far away each point of that shape is. The other robots follow the edge of the shape until they reach where they're supposed to be.

The algorithm is so smart that it can even account for those robots that get in the way of their fellow robots or end up away from their intended location. Each robot relies on the robots around it to monitor inconsistencies.

"In the future, we'd like [the Kilobots] to do something functional, but for now, they're just a research platform," says Michael Rubenstein, lead researcher on the project.

Future applications for robot swarms might be useful in such areas as search and rescue, construction projects and medical devices.

"Large groups of robots working together can solve problems in fundamentally different ways," says James McLurkin, a professor of computer science at Rice University. "The goal that we're trying to move forward is understanding the relationship between simple, local interactions and complex group behaviors."

Rubenstein's future plans include designing robots that can attach to each other and form solid structures, similar to Lego.