Ant-repreneurs: swarm intelligence

Do you still remember that smartass kid at primary school who kept asking you what the strongest animal on earth would be? After a serious amount of thought (“Is it a lion? A bear? An elephant?”) you finally gave your guess: “a whale”. Only the face of your fellow student told you you were so wrong. The smartass answered: “No, it’s an ant.” – “Huh?”

In fact, they’ve always been correct. Ants are known to be the strongest animals on earth. Some of them are able to lift and carry in their jaws something 50 times their own body weight. That would be the same as a human lifting a truck with its teeth. Recent technological innovation shows that their powers reach further. Are the ants ready to replace humans?

The German engineering firm Festo, which supplies automation products to factories around the world, has created robotic ants and butterflies to do their research. In collaboration with several universities, they achieved to create tiny machines which mimic animals, in the hope of developing a new and useful technology.

Swarm robots

Ant robotics is a special case of swarm robotics. They’re genius robots with limited sensing and computational capabilities. But how does swarm intelligence work? Cameras are installed in the operating room to track the robots and pass through information to a central computer, which monitors the robots’ motion. Thanks to their light weight, the butterfly types are able to fly for four minutes on only battery power. Moreover, the ants can recharge themselves by resting their antennae against a close installed power source. Step by step, this robotic revolution turns into a durable project.

But the fact that these tiny robots are capable of team work fancies all imagination. The ants operate in swarms to accomplish tasks and move objects too heavy for other machines. “They communicate and coordinate their actions and movements among each other” explains an engineer from Festo. “The technology is highly advanced. Their legs are made of flexible ceramic which twitches using a sensor technology to make the ants walk. They even have working pincers to help them latch onto objects.”

This innovative technology demonstrates in many ways how autonomous individual components can deliver a complex task, working together as an overall network.

According to Festo, factories of the future could be operated by thousands of these tiny robots. But as with all of Festo's bionic projects, you are almost certainly never ever going to get to play with one of these robots.

Interested? Check out the following websites:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/festo-bionic-ants-and-butterflies

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/11503750/Will-factories-of-the-future-be-run-by-robotic-ants.html