Ant robotics is a special case of

swarm robotics Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. ″In a robot swarm, the collective behavior of the robots results from local interactions between ...

. Swarm robots are simple (and hopefully, therefore cheap) 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 property that enables a system to continue operating properly in the event of the failure of one or more faults within some of its components. If its operating quality decreases at all, the decrease is proportional to the ...

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 o ...

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 behavi ...

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 Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...

. The robots consisted of

sensor A sensor is a device that produces an output signal for the purpose of sensing a physical phenomenon. In the broadest definition, a sensor is a device, module, machine, or subsystem that detects events or changes in its environment and sends ...

infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from arou ...

emitters, and

communication system A communications system or communication system is a collection of individual telecommunications networks, transmission systems, relay stations, tributary stations, and terminal equipment usually capable of interconnection and interopera ...

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 pancrustacean 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 (head, Thorax (ins ...

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 A robot is a machine—especially one Computer program, programmable by a computer—capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically. A robot can be guided by an external control device, or the robot control, control may be ...

, 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 Probabilistic logic (also probability logic and probabilistic reasoning) involves the use of probability and logic to deal with uncertain situations. Probabilistic logic extends traditional logic truth tables with probabilistic expressions. A diffic ...

for solving the

simultaneous localization and mapping Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the computational problem of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent's location within it. While this initially appears to be a chi ...

problem. Researchers have also developed a theoretical foundation for ant robotics, based on ideas from real-time

heuristic A heuristic (; ), or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, ...

search,

stochastic analysis Stochastic calculus is a branch of mathematics that operates on stochastic processes. It allows a consistent theory of integration to be defined for integrals of stochastic processes with respect to stochastic processes. This field was created an ...

and

graph theory In mathematics, 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 theory), vertices'' ( ...

References

External links

Ant robot
by Sven Koenig
Ant algorithm
by Israel Wagner
Robo-ants
by 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-agent systems Multi-robot systems

Invention

Background

See also

References

External links