Fire ant colonies could inspire robot swarms
Fire ants can form structures by climbing onto each other en masse. Despite being individually simple, in a swarm they show complex behaviors through their coordination. Researchers observed that ants that are supporting larger loads move faster and shift their legs to lessen the load they must bear. This gives rise to an emergent property that caused the swarm of ants to behave like a fluid, since the rapid attachment and detachment of ant appendages can be likened to the molecular forces that hold a liquid together. This behavior has inspired development of swarm robots that show decentralized organization.
The amount of communication that takes place between individual fire ants is extremely large, warranting the use of network theory to analyze the behavior of the swarm as a whole. An individual ant’s behavior is very simple and can be modelled by some rules as a node. The edges could be connected to other nearby ants. The system evolves over time as ants move over each other and react to other ants moving over them. This set of simple rules could over time give rise to complex phenomena that can cause ants to form into structures depending on external stimuli. This has clear applications in robotics. While there exist platforms for distributed computing across robots, most of them operate on a client-server model, in which a central machine coordinates the rest of the robots. The advantage of a decentralized solution is that the entire system is resilient to the loss of any one machine, whereas in the former model, were the server to go down the entire system would fail. Challenges of swarm robotics are how to devise a set of rules and protocols that give rise to desired emergent behaviors.
Personally, I find this article very interesting since it relates biology and swarm robotics through networks. A swarm robot system that mimics the signaling patterns of fire ants can potentially make way for groups of tiny robots that can operate inside tight spaces, maybe even going so far as to become part of a larger structure or building. They could act to maintain and repair the structure, or even reassemble it into something else. This area definitely have potential for a breakthrough.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/fire-ant-colonies-could-inspire-future-robots