Ant robotics is a special case of
swarm robotics. Swarm robots are simple (and therefore likely to be cost-effective) robots with limited sensing and computational capabilities. This makes it feasible to deploy teams of swarm robots and take advantage of the resulting
fault tolerance
Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to maintain proper operation despite failures or faults in one or more of its components. This capability is essential for high-availability, mission-critical, or even life-critical systems.
Fault t ...
and parallelism. Swarm robots cannot use conventional planning methods due to their limited
sensing and computational capabilities. Thus, their behavior is often driven by local interactions. Ant robots are swarm robots that can communicate via markings, similar to
ants
Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. Ants evolved from vespoid wasp ancestors in the Cretaceous period. More than 13,800 of an estimated total of ...
that lay and follow
pheromone
A pheromone () is a secreted or excreted chemical factor that triggers a social response in members of the same species. Pheromones are chemicals capable of acting like hormones outside the body of the secreting individual, to affect the behavio ...
trails. Some ant robots use long-lasting trails (either regular trails of a chemical substance
or smart trails of
transceiver
In radio communication, a transceiver is an electronic device which is a combination of a radio ''trans''mitter and a re''ceiver'', hence the name. It can both transmit and receive radio waves using an antenna, for communication purposes. The ...
s). Others use short-lasting trails including heat and alcohol. Others even use virtual trails.
Invention
In 1991, American electrical engineer
James McLurkin was the first to conceptualize the idea of "robot ants" while working at the
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
. The robots consisted of
sensors,
infrared
Infrared (IR; sometimes called infrared light) is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than that of visible light but shorter than microwaves. The infrared spectral band begins with the waves that are just longer than those ...
emitters, and
communication system
A communications system is a collection of individual telecommunications networks systems, relay stations, tributary stations, and terminal equipment usually capable of interconnection and interoperation to form an integrated whole. Communic ...
s capable of
detecting objects in their path. McLurkin's invention was through studying the behavior of real ants in
ant colonies and keeping
ant farms as a basis for his programming. Through this examination, he could better understand how
insect
Insects (from Latin ') are Hexapoda, hexapod invertebrates of the class (biology), class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body (Insect morphology#Head, head, ...
s structured their workloads in order to produce a viable and working prototype of robotic ants.
Background
Researchers have developed ant robot hardware and software and demonstrated, both in simulation and on physical
robots, that single ant robots or teams of ant robots solve
robot-navigation tasks (such as path following and terrain coverage
) robustly and efficiently. For example, trails coordinate the ant robots via implicit communication and provide an alternative to
probabilistic reasoning for solving the
simultaneous localization and mapping problem.
Researchers have also developed a theoretical foundation for ant robotics, based on ideas from real-time
heuristic
A heuristic or heuristic technique (''problem solving'', '' mental shortcut'', ''rule of thumb'') is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless ...
search,
stochastic analysis and
graph theory
In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...
.
See also
*
Swarm intelligence, especially
ant colony optimization
References
External links
Ant robotby Sven Koenig
Ant algorithmby Israel Wagner
Robo-antsby Zhenishbek Zhakypov
The text of this article was adopted from th
in compliance with their Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.
{{Robotics
American inventions
Multi-robot systems