Ant robotics
Encyclopedia
Ant robotics is a special case of swarm robotics
Swarm robotics
Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment...

. Swarm robots are simple and 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 and parallelism. Swarm robots cannot use conventional planning methods due to their limited sensing
Robotic sensing
Robotic sensing is a branch of robotics science intended to give robots sensing capabilities, so that robots are more human-like. Robotic sensing mainly gives robots the ability to see, touch, hear and move and uses algorithms that require environmental feedback.-Method:The visual sensing system...

 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 that lay and follow pheromone
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 outside the body of the secreting individual to impact the behavior of the receiving individual...

 trails. Some ant robots use long-lasting trails (either regular trails of a chemical substance or smart trails of transceiver
Transceiver
A transceiver is a device comprising both a transmitter and a receiver which are combined and share common circuitry or a single housing. When no circuitry is common between transmit and receive functions, the device is a transmitter-receiver. The term originated in the early 1920s...

s), others use short-lasting trails (heat, odor or alcohol), and others even use virtual trails.

Invention

In 1991, American electrical engineer James McLurkin
James McLurkin
James McLurkin is an engineering professor at Rice University specializing in swarm robotics. He appeared on Nova on PBS. In addition, he is a winner of the 2003 Lemelson-MIT Prize and completed his Ph.D. in computer science in May 2008 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science...

 was the first to conceptualize the idea of "robot ants" while working at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory...

 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

. The robots consisted of sensor
Sensor
A sensor is a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal which can be read by an observer or by an instrument. For example, a mercury-in-glass thermometer converts the measured temperature into expansion and contraction of a liquid which can be read on a calibrated...

s, infrared
Infrared
Infrared light is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light, measured from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.74 micrometres , and extending conventionally to 300 µm...

 emitters, and communication systems capable of detecting objects
Object detection
Object detection is a computer technology related to computer vision and image processing that deals with detecting instances of semantic objects of a certain class in digital images and videos. Well-researched domains of object detection include face detection and pedestrian detection...

 in their path. McLurkin's invention was through studying the behavior of real ants in ant colonies
Ant colony
An ant colony is an underground lair where ants live, eat and mate. Colonies consist of a series of underground chambers, connected to each other and the surface of the earth by small tunnels. There are rooms for nurseries, food storage, and mating...

 and keeping ant farms
Formicarium
A formicarium or ant farm is a vivarium which is designed primarily for the study of ant colonies and how ants behave. Those who study ant behavior are known as myrmecologists.-History:...

 as a basis for his programming. Through this examination, he could better understand how insect
Insect
Insects are a class of living creatures within the arthropods that have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body , three pairs of jointed legs, compound eyes, and two antennae...

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
Robotic mapping
Robotic mapping is related to cartography. The goal for an autonomous robot to be able to construct a map or floor plan and to localize itself in it...

 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
Simultaneous localization and mapping
Simultaneous localization and mapping is a technique used by robots and autonomous vehicles to build up a map within an unknown environment , or to update a map within a known environment , while at the same time keeping track of their current location.- Operational definition :Maps are used...

 problem.

Researchers have also developed a theoretical foundation for ant robotics, based on ideas from real-time heuristic
Heuristic
Heuristic refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution, where an exhaustive search is impractical...

 search, stochastic analysis and graph theory
Graph theory
In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of graphs, mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects from a certain collection. A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of...

. Recently, it was shown that a single ant robot (modeled as finite state machine
Finite state machine
A finite-state machine or finite-state automaton , or simply a state machine, is a mathematical model used to design computer programs and digital logic circuits. It is conceived as an abstract machine that can be in one of a finite number of states...

) can simulate the execution of any arbitrary Turing machine
Turing machine
A Turing machine is a theoretical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a...

. This proved that a single ant robot, using pheromones, can execute arbitrarily complex single-robot algorithms. However, the result unfortunately does not hold for N robots.

See also

  • Ants
  • Robots
  • Swarm Intelligence
    Swarm intelligence
    Swarm intelligence is the collective behaviour of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence...

    , especially ant colony optimization
    Ant colony optimization
    In computer science and operations research, the ant colony optimization algorithm ' is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs....


External links



The text of this article was adopted from the Tutorial on Ant Robotics in compliance with their Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License.
The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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