You can now coordinate 1,000+ robots in real-time using nothing but cheap, off-the-shelf Bluetooth.
Standard low-power wireless protocols like BLE fall apart when more than 50 devices try to talk at once, leading to massive lag. Mari is a new link layer that allows a single gateway to control 102 robots with high responsiveness and scales to thousands via ultra-fast handovers. This removes the 'communication ceiling' for massive robot swarms without requiring expensive, high-power custom hardware. It makes swarm-based warehouse automation and environmental monitoring technically feasible using existing commodity radios. It's a massive upgrade for scale without the hardware cost.
Mari: Responsive Wireless Communication for Low-Power Large-Scale Robot Swarms
SSRN · 6571600
Connecting large swarms of low-power micro-robots remains an open challenge: existing communication systems either lack the scalability to connect hundreds of units, or fail to deliver the low latency required for responsive control. For example, while Wi-Fi and BLE are commonly used in swarm robotics, scaling beyond 50 robots remains challenging. We introduce the Micro-robot Access Radio Infrastructure (Mari), a new link layer and architecture that aims to connect thousands of robots. Our TSCH-