Scientists have successfully
replicated the behaviour of a colony of ants on the move with the use of
miniature robots, as reported in the journal PLOS Computational Biology. The
researchers, based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, USA) and
at the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (Toulouse, France), aimed to
discover how individual ants, when part of a moving colony, orient themselves
in the labyrinthine pathways that stretch from their nest to various food
sources. The study focused mainly on how Argentine ants behave and coordinate
themselves in both symmetrical and asymmetrical pathways. In nature, ants do
this by leaving chemical pheromone trails. This was reproduced by a swarm of
sugar cube size robots, called ‘Alices’, leaving light trails that they can
detect with two light sensors mimicking the role of the ants' antennae.
In the beginning of the
experiment, where branches of the maze had no light trail, the robots adopted
an exploratory behaviour modelled on the regular insect movement pattern of
moving randomly but in the same general direction. This led the robots to
choose the path that deviated least from their trajectory at each bifurcation
of the network. If the robots detected a light trail, they would turn to follow
that path. One outcome of the robotic model was the discovery that the robots
did not need to be programmed to identify and compute the geometry of the
network bifurcations. They managed to navigate the maze using only the
pheromone light trail and the programmed directional random walk, which
directed them to the more direct route between their starting area and a target
area on the periphery of the maze.
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