1,000 DotBots: building an ultra large interactive robotic swarm

What it is

The DotBots Testbed is a platform for swarm robotics research and education. As of early 2026, it features 725 connected, real-time-controllable micro-robots, with an ongoing goal of 1,000. It is the centerpiece of OpenSwarm, a Horizon Europe consortium of 10 partners across Europe.

The testbed lets researchers run large-scale swarm experiments interactively from a web browser — sending commands, collecting telemetry, and pushing firmware updates to hundreds of robots in seconds.

What I built

As Lead Research Engineer at Inria Paris, I architect and lead the testbed’s development:

• The wireless infrastructure (Mari), a custom BLE-based link layer with a TSCH schedule and mobility, scaling the radio to 100+ nodes per gateway
• Coordination inside Inria with a 3-person core testbed team
• Coordination across the OpenSwarm consortium — partners in France, Belgium, Ireland, China

Why it’s hard

Running an interactive testbed at hundreds of nodes is a different problem from any small testbed:

• Bringing 725 heterogeneous nodes online and keeping them online — flaky hardware, weak batteries, RF issues, operator error
• Pushing firmware updates to the entire fleet without bricking the ones at the back of the room
• Letting users send real-time control commands to the swarm with sub-second latency — a problem the Mari link layer was built to solve
• Coordinating deployments across multiple partner sites, each with different floor plans, RF environments, and host machines

Numbers

• 725 robots deployed (January 2026); 1,000 target
• 10 partner institutions across Europe (OpenSwarm consortium)
• Deployments at Inria Paris, Limerick (Ireland), and OpenSwarm partner sites across Europe
• 🏆 Best Demo Award at EWSN 2025 — for a 120-device live demo
• DotBot-v3 — newest robot platform, debuted at EWSN 2025

Links

• OpenSwarm consortium
• DotBots GitHub organization
• Mari — the wireless link layer powering interactive control