# ShapeLab/SwarmUI

Necessary material to build and use Zooids to create Swarm User Interfaces

Repository: https://github.com/ShapeLab/SwarmUI
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/shapelab-swarmui
Homepage: http://shape.stanford.edu/research/swarm/
Language: C++
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0
License Family: other
Topics: zooid, robot, swarm-uis
Last push: 2023-05-17T01:48:42+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 32/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 35, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3696, "days_push": 1205, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1570, forks 250 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:05.347169+00:00)

## What it is
Zooids is an open-source, open-hardware platform for building tabletop swarm user interfaces, consisting of small wheeled micro robots, a radio base-station, a DLP projector-based tracking system, and a layered software framework. The repository contains the hardware designs, firmware, and software (application, simulation, server, and hardware layers) needed to build and control the robot swarm.

## Use cases
- build tabletop swarm user interface robots
- control many small robots with position tracking
- develop interactive applications with swarm robots
- set up projector-based optical tracking for micro robots
- simulate robot swarm behavior before deploying to hardware
- research tangible and swarm interfaces in HCI

## When to choose
- you want to build or extend the Zooids open-hardware swarm robot platform
- you are doing HCI research on swarm or tangible user interfaces
- you need a complete hardware-plus-software reference for micro robot swarms with optical tracking

## When to avoid
- you need a general-purpose robot simulation toolkit without custom hardware
- you want a software-only swarm simulation with no physical robots
- you cannot source the specialized DLP projector and custom electronics the platform requires

## Facets
- artifact type: framework
- maturity: maintenance
- function: simulation, robotics, middleware, developer-tools
- domain: robotics, hardware
- platform: cpp, cross-platform
- tags: swarm-user-interfaces, zooids, open-hardware, tabletop-robots, optical-tracking, human-computer-interaction, research-platform, research

## Member repositories
- ShapeLab/SwarmUI (main) score 32

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:05.347169+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:58:27.815710+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/ShapeLab/SwarmUI (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:05.347169+00:00, sha f4059b55e0e9)
  - homepage: http://shape.stanford.edu/research/swarm/ (fetched 2026-08-29T11:28:07.935384+00:00, sha 0c3678a8d30a)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.